


Ab Extra, Salus

by afterandalasia



Series: Disney Hunger Games [1]
Category: Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Mulan (1998)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Hunger Games, Child Death, Coercion, Community: big-bigbang, Crossover, Dark, Dystopia, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Hunger Games-Typical Death/Violence, Kidnapping, Medical Procedures, POV Fa Mulan, Revolution, Torture, Violence, Wordcount: 50.000-100.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 01:02:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 31
Words: 84,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a not-too-distant future, Panem lies under the rule of President Yensid, twelve Districts shackled to a central Capitol. Every year, each District is supposed to give up two Tributes to fight to the death in a horrific spectacle known and celebrated as the Hunger Games.</p><p>When Fa Mulan takes her brother's place at the Reaping, all that she is thinking about is saving his life. As time wears on, however, she begins to suspect that something bigger is unfolding, and the world falls away from beneath her in more ways than one. The world of Panem beings to dissolve, and she finds herself one of those who are blamed for the rebellion that has suddenly sparked into life - blamed by a government that will stop at nothing to punish those who act against it.</p><p> </p><p>For full character list and warnings, see notes (at beginning).</p><p>Minor edits 16th July 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One - The Tribute

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this story turned into a monster and a half, but it has been a really amazing time. In some ways, it came from wanting to tell two stories at once: Mulan's, and Kida's. This is the result. For more extended notes on my worldbuilding, see chapter 31 (Afterword).
> 
> Warnings: Violence, gore, character death (major and minor), coercive behaviour by government and authorities, forced sex reassignment surgery, non-consensual medical treatment, torture (including pharmaceutrical, electrical, beatings, waterboarding), confinement, reference to drug abuse, reference to mental illnesses.
> 
> First up, I want to thank [deadflowers5](deadflowers5.livejournal.com) for running the [Big Big Bang](big-bigbang.livejournal.com) and wrangling us all into posting. I stand in awe of you. Secondly, I want to both thank and pimp [numberthescars](numberthescars) for her [amazing art](http://numberthescars.livejournal.com/25289.html). Seriously, go check her stuff out, because it is beautiful. Finally, of course, a huge thanks to my beta [krissielee](krissielee.livejournal.com) for her amazing work, and to my beta/alpha [darkstar1991](darkstar1991.livejournal.com) for helping me to bash out details, going over ideas, and letting me run around in the early hours of the morning trying to figure things out.
> 
> For a hugely detailed and interesting discussion/review of The Hunger Games, I would recommend checking out the work of [farla](farla.livejournal.com). Be warned that it is highly critical, but it is certainly very interesting.
> 
> It took a lot of characters to populate this world, from a lot of different Disney films. The ones used include (sometimes as very brief references):  
> 101 Dalmatians - Anita  
> Aladdin - Aladdin, Jasmine  
> Atlantis: The Lost Empire - Helga, Kida, Milo, Rourke  
> Beauty and the Beast - Beast  
> Cinderella - Cinderella, Lady Tremaine  
> Fantasia - Chernabog, Yensid, Mickey Mouse  
> Hercules - Hercules, Megara  
> The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Esmerelda, Quasimodo  
> Lilo & Stitch - Cobra Bubbles, Lilo, Nani  
> The Little Mermaid - Ariel, Eric, Grimsby  
> Mulan - Chien-Po, The Emperor, Grandmother Fa, Hayabusa, Li, Ling, Mulan, Shang, Ting-Ting, Yao, Zhou  
> Pocahontas - Kocoum, Pocahontas  
> Sleeping Beauty - Fauna, Flora, Leah, Maleficent, Merryweather  
> Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Snow White  
> Tangled - Rapunzel  
> Tarzan -Tarzan  
> Toy Story - Jessie, Woody  
> Treasure Planet - Amelia, Jim Hawkins

If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that the Capitol had controlled the weather to make sure that it was just perfect for the Reaping. Sunshine, but with just enough thin cirrus cloud to stop it from being too bright; warm enough for everyone to be comfortable, but cool enough to keep us on our toes.

Again, I reminded myself how lucky I was in my life. Lucky to be a citizen of Panem, to live in the illustrious District One, to be so well-treated by the Capitol. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Maybe if I repeated it often enough, it would start to seem true.

It was up to my Grandmother to accompany us to the sign in for the Reaping. I clutched Ping’s hand tightly in mine, perhaps more tightly than any sixteen-year-old should cling to the hand of her twin brother, but we had always been inseparable. Father had to leave earlier to make it to the stage before the crowds gathered, and mother was always allowed to accompany him. As a result, I had changed out of the dress into which my mother had forced me, into pants and a shirt to match Ping’s, and scrubbed the make-up from my face. Grandmother had fussed me into my jacket, but had not had time to do the same to Ping before we had to move.

“Five out of seven,” Ping muttered beside me. “Five out of seven.”

I squeezed his hand in return. Father said sometimes that we should have been identical twins, but the message got garbled along the way, and that he ended up with a son and a daughter instead. Mother disapproved of such comments. Neither of us loved the Hunger Games the way that we were supposed to – children of the victor of the last Quarter Quell, one of the heroes of District One, trained for four hours a day since we were seven years old to be some of the best fighters that the District would ever produce. It was a countdown: in two more years we would be expected to volunteer, one or maybe even both of us, in keeping with our family’s honour. I was already planning to agree with any other Careers turning eighteen that one of the other boys would take Ping’s place; ever since the injury when he was thirteen, his back had not been as strong. Besides, he was gentler than I had ever been.

“Come on. Let’s get this over and done with,” I replied.

Two more years; five out of seven. We signed in with pricks of our fingers, were shepherded in different directions, and I ducked back under the barriers three paces later to join up with Ping again. Nobody really cared, wouldn’t until we were eighteen and ready to volunteer.

Ping shivered as a gust of wind caught us, and I shrugged off my coat and pushed it towards him. We weren’t far off the same height, the same build. Nobody could remember a time before we had replied to each other’s names, before Ping and Mulan had been completely inseparable and practically interchangeable.

The crowds cheered as the stage started to fill up. District One had produced so many winners that they rotated who took to the stage, but our father had a permanent spot reserved for him. Fa Zhou, the man who won the Quarter Quell, who still carried the scars on his leg because he was proud of them, and would not accept a prosthetic or even surgery to heal it. Fa Zhou, who successfully trained four more winners before retiring and handing over the reins to Li Shang, winner of the 69th Hunger Games at the age of eighteen, and now the main trainer instead.

People cheered at the appropriate points during the speech, as well, during the description of the history of Panem, the Dark Days, the setting up of the Hunger Games. As if it was a good thing for us, not a reason that at least one child died every year. District One always played it as a spectacle.

The mayor looked out at us, tilting her chin as if she is about to announce a great celebration. “This is a time for repentance – and a time for thanks!”

Ping hugged my coat more tightly around him as they began to list the District One victors, the camera crews circling the stage to get shots of the ones that are still alive. Father wasn’t the oldest, but he was one of those who got the loudest applause. Him and Li Shang. As the list was completed, the applause swelled even louder, and I clenched my fists at the sound of it. Father might be the picture of the gracious victor in public, but I knew the nightmares that he still had.

As the mayor draws to the end, she gives a broad, beaming smile and steps aside. “And now our escort, Chi Fu.”

My lip curled as the thin man stepped up to the podium. He was wearing blue clothes in the ostentatious Capitol style, the many gold marks on his skin probably false rather than real tattoos. I doubted he could handle the pain. He had long fingernails, again tipped in gold, and a thin, gravity-defying moustache. As well as the most irritating voice I had ever come across.

“Welcome to the Hunger Games, proud citizens of District One. May our honour be great on this day.”

Not as catchy as some of the other districts, but then again neither was Chi Fu. He walked over to one of the carved crystal globes that held the slips of paper with Tributes’ names on them, rubbing his fingers over each other as if he was about to touch something distasteful.

“First... the women.” Always ‘women’. As if by saying it, he could lie to himself about the fact that he was drawing the names of children from the bowls. He reached in, swirled around a little still wearing that look of faint disgust, and drew out one of the slips. I’d seen the paper that was used for it, just once, thick and creamy, almost like old parchment, the names on it handwritten in blood-red ink. “The female tribute for the 74th Hunger Games is... Leah!”

The cameras immediately found her, a blonde-haired fourteen year old who looked around in bewilderment. I knew immediately that she was not even in training to be a Career, and the crowds did not even begin to part when one of the eighteen-year-olds raised her hand and stepped to the front of her roped-off area.

“I volunteer.”

A rippling sigh went through the crowd as the cameras panned again, applause broke out, and the young woman was escorted up to the stage. She had long, shining black hair and dangerous green eyes that caught and held Chi Fu’s gaze, a faint smile on her lips as if this was indeed an honour. I recognised her from some of the training sessions, and knew her name before she spoke it aloud, not even waiting for Chi Fu to ask.

“Maleficent Le Fay. Well... just Maleficent.”

Her eyes flashed to the cameras as she spoke, giving another smile. Her lips were very red, perfect; I wondered whether she had already had some cosmetic procedures done before volunteering, how long she had been planning this.

“Well, I’m very glad to have you up here, Maleficent,” Chi Fu simpered to her. “If you’d care to stand here... yes, perfect. So keen! Wonderful to have another of our young people so ready to bring honour to the district.”

I was seriously considering whether I could pull his moustache off without getting imprisoned for it. Or even whether a prison sentence would be worth it.

“And now for the gentlemen...” he crossed over to the other bowl. Another swift swirl, and he drew another piece of paper. “Fa Ping!”

This time, the cheers erupted immediately. We were the children of Fa Zhou, after all; even if it was two years early, nobody was going to deny us our opportunity.

I stamped on Ping’s foot, hard, knowing that it would send a jolt of pain through him, and when he bent down slapped his spine. It made him fall to his knees, and I knew it would confine him to bed for at least a day, but before he could protest I threw my hands in the air and walked forward, drinking in the cheers, heart pounding in my chest.

What was I doing?

The question rang in my ears as I walked towards the stage. Father’s face had gone blank; I knew when he caught my eyes that he would recognise me, know the difference between me and Ping. But what difference was there, really, now? In two years’ time at least one of us would be expected to volunteer, and I was more likely than Ping to survive. His jaw clenched; both hands tightened around the head of his walking stick. But the crowds were cheering for me, and the cameras came in close, and it was far too late to think twice as I reached the front of the roped-off area, stepped out, and was led towards the stage.


	2. Chapter 2

Maleficent gave me a cool, collected smile as I joined her on the stage. She was taller than me by at least ten centimetres, more polished, beautiful. But it seemed that no-one save my father – white-knuckled, staring with tears in his eyes – could recognise me, and his reaction could be written off as a father seeing his son mount the podium to follow him, perhaps, to glory. Chi Fu, still looking somewhat displeased with the matter, took both of our hands and raised them up high above us, drinking in the sound of the crowd.

I had heard the Treaty of Treason so many times that I could recite it myself, and was certainly never going to find it interesting to hear the mayor recite it once again. Through it all, Maleficent was watching me, coldly, in between flashing seductive smiles to the camera and flirting with it from beneath her long sooty lashes. She was beautiful, and I looked nervous and childish beside her; I tried to pull myself together, but still wanted to scream.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know how long this would actually last. It wasn’t like I was going to get away with this forever, after all. My thoughts were still numbed by the time that the mayor motioned for me to step forwards and shake Maleficent’s hand. Her nails felt like they were going to cut into my skin.

Then the anthem began to play, Peacekeepers rose to take me away, and the full of what I had done began to crash down upon me.

  
  
  
  


Reporters and their cameras flooded around us as we were coaxed into rooms to say goodbye to our families. Normally, they wouldn’t be allowed in all at once, but this time my family came in as a pile, Ping and Grandmother and Mother and-

“Baba,” I whispered into his shoulder as he hugged me, fiercely, and I felt his tears on my cheek though I was still too shocked to cry myself. His arms clenched around me as if he would never let go, and I found myself supporting part of his weight as he dropped his cane to hold me. It made tears rise in my gaze, making the world waver, but I blinked them away and squeezed back. “I can do this, Baba.”

He drew back just far enough to see my face, now crying without any shame. Since he had given up training, he would not be there to see me through – or to protect me from being discovered.

“If anyone can,” he said, voice husky, “it is you.”

One of his thumbs brushed my cheekbone, the way that it always did when he was proud of me, and I nearly broke down and cried just because of that. Then Ping was pushing in, grabbing hold of me and whispering desperately.

“What are you _doing_? You can’t-”

I put a finger on his lips. I couldn’t see any cameras in the room, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t there, and I didn’t want to start a scandal already. If I was going to make a scene, I was going to make it as big as possible; something stubborn and angry was already gnawing away at my insides.

Mother met my gaze, but before either of us could say anything she simply burst into tears. Looking pained, Grandmother took her aside to comfort her, patting her on the shoulder and eventually leading her from the room. I wasn’t her favourite child, but what mother would _want_ to see one of her children walking away into a twenty-three-out-of-twenty-four chance of death? At least she wasn’t there to say anything to my face.

“Mulan,” I said to Ping, trying to stop my voice from shaking, “You have to be strong for me. You have to be brave.” He looked at me like I was going absolutely mad, then realisation dawned and he began to shake his head. “I _need you_ to do this for me.”

“I can’t-”

“You have to.” My hands tightened on his shoulders, fingers digging in until he winced again. He had already been walking stiffly when he entered the room, his back started to seize up from where I had struck him. “You have to do this. For me, Mulan.” The shaking of his head was starting to slow, tears in his eyes. He mouth ‘Mulan’ in return, but at least did not voice it.

Father put his hand on Ping’s shoulder, gave me a respectful nod, and turned to lead him away. I knew that we could have switched there and then, that I could have walked out with father and Ping could have gone on to the Games. Where, we all knew, he would die.

Baba believed in me.

When they left I hurried over to the Peacekeeper at the door, and said that I did not want to have any more visitors. The young man looked rather surprised, but nodded, and I saw him turning away my classmates, family friends, a group of people all waiting to see Ping off. With the door closed again, I was left with a few minutes to compose myself, but just found myself wondering exactly how mad I had become. What would the Capitol even do? Put me to death? Punish my family? It wasn’t _possible_ to fake entrance into the Games; there were dozens of people who would see me before I went into the Arena. I just didn’t know how they would punish me for it.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I muttered, curling my hands into fists alongside my ears. “I cannot believe I am _doing this_.”

We were given an hour, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I walked around the room, taking in the plush carpets, the paintings on the walls. Portraits of previous winners looked down on me, including my father and Shang. Finally, my legs shaking, I sank down into one of the chairs and tried to remember all of the things which I had been taught, all of the fighting methods, all of the weapons that I could use. I had been taught to do it for so long that it had become almost a mantra, calming, soothing, and as my adrenaline cooled I realised that I had stopped shaking and started, instead, to feel slightly faint and distant. It was easier, though, than actually feeling the pain.

I waved to the people on the platform as the cameras flashed. Maleficent wasn’t waving, just turning and posing, catching peoples’ eyes and smiling seductively. Besides her, I wasn’t dramatic, wasn’t pulling in the cameras, but I knew that before too long people would pick up on the fact that I was Fa Zhou’s ‘son’, and everyone would be looking at me instead. For now, I was more than happy to let her keep the cameras trained on her, in her sleek green dress and black jacket, her striking beauty.

All the same, I waved and smiled, and the Peacekeepers hustled us onto the train as if we were still in far greater demand than we really were. Once again, it was plush, beautiful, and I was hoping to flee into one of the cabins to stay out of the way. Instead, Chi Fu ushered us through into the dining cart, with its broad table and views of the countryside whipping past, and turned on the television so that we could the Reaping in other Districts.

The meal didn’t manage to linger in my mind, despite how nice the food must have been: my eyes remained fixed on the screen. The Reapings moved from District One through to District Twelve each year, and sitting to watch them – as I always had with my father, Ping and my mother not being able to face them – reminded me in the strangest way of home. I wished that I could hold my father’s hands.

District Two ended up with two Career tributes, who must have both been eighteen and planning for years for this. The girl was striking, sexy enough to rival Maleficent, with a whippy blonde braid and a taut body; the boy was heavily muscled, with a chiselled jaw and a dangerous gaze. Helga Sinclair and Lyle Rourke, the declarations said. Classic Careers, I knew already. District Three: a sulky-looking fifteen-year-old called Jim, and a girl called Amelia with a feline quality to her movements.

When District Four came up, even Chi Fu stopped his note-taking and frowned. The original female tribute was a girl called Ariel, red-haired and wide-eyed when the cameras fell upon her, but her name had hardly been fully announced when one of the girls at the very front of the eighteen-year-olds’ area lunged forward, crying out to volunteer. Even I recognised the girl, dark-skinned and white-haired, blue tattoos snaking over her body. Kidagakash, the She-Devil of District Four.

Kidagakash was born when her mother was only seventeen, her father nineteen and a victor of the Games two years before. Nobody could have expected that her mother would be reaped the very next year, and die in the subsequent Games. After her father died at sea – all too common in District Four – Kidagakash was raised by her grandparents. She had demanded to be trained from almost as soon as she could talk, determined to become a Career and take her revenge upon the Games that had killed her mother. At the age of fourteen, her name had even been drawn, but a Career tribute had volunteered in her place. Kidagakash had spat in the girl’s face on national television, and it had made her famous as the person who had wanted the Games more than anyone else. She had become an overnight star, and her story had received a television spot every year thereafter. Now, eighteen, she would be my enemy.

Her male counterpart, Eric, faded into insignificance beside her. I almost felt sorry for him. District Five offered up a sassy, self-confident girl named Megara and a powerfully-built boy called Hercules, who waved shyly at the cameras and flashed a brilliant smile. From District Six, a great monster of a man that the announcement declared was called Shan Yu and a sharp-eyed girl called Hayabusa.

District Seven would cause uproar in the Capitol, I was sure. The girl, Esmeralda, was sixteen and pretty in an exotic sort of way; the boy, Quasimodo, was dramatically physically deformed. He was stooped, short, one shoulder stood higher than the other, his teeth were uneven, and one eye was heavily overshadowed by a growth on his brow. Even I could not suppress a gasp as he appeared on the screen, and Chi Fu shuddered; Quasimodo had space all around him as he made his way up to the stage, people moving aside for him rather more than was necessary. The part of me that had been trained for the Games, however, noted how powerfully he was built, the fluid way he moved, and knew full well that anyone who had been treated so badly would either be as tender as a lamb or willing to kill without a second thought. Even, occasionally, both.

From District Eight came fairly standard tributes, Jasmine and Aladdin by name, with matching bronze skin and slightly hungry looks in their eyes. District Nine almost broke my heart – one powerful seventeen-year-old boy named Kocoum, who stood stoic and proud as the people applauded weakly, and one flighty twelve-year-old girl called Pocahontas, at whose choosing a rippling sigh ran through the crowds, though no-one volunteered for her. She was tiny, slight, but something in her eyes was older than the rest of her when the camera pulled close.

A redheaded girl with heavy freckles and a confident walk came from District Ten, under the name of Jessie; her male counterpart, a rangy young man named Woody, nodded but said little as he followed her. By then, they were reaching out into the poorest district, the ones that most rarely won, and I knew with a sinking heart that I was most likely to see these people die. A girl named Rapunzel, blonde hair and huge green eyes, from District Eleven, who clung to the hand of the boy Tarzan even as he looked at her uncertainly. And finally, District Twelve with its grey poverty and sullen anger offered up a thirteen-year-old in ragged clothes called Cinderella, and a scrawny boy with oversized glasses called Milo. I had never seen anybody wearing glasses before – my grandmother had already had three surgeries to correct her sight, and nobody had thought anything of it. Doubtless by the time that I next saw him, he too would have perfect vision once again.

Again and again, the anthem repeated. Sometimes it clung in my head at night, so often had I heard it during my life. Occasionally I heard, as well, my father whisper prayers that I did not ask the content of.

“Well,” said a voice behind us, and I whirled in my chair to see Li Shang standing in the doorway. He was wearing loose pants and a shirt so fine that I could see the outlines of his muscles underneath. It almost made me blush, before I remembered that I was a boy here. “It looks like we have a good chance this year.”

I would have said that all but one of the other boys was larger than I was, and I was willing to bet that they were stronger. From the girls, there was perhaps more of a range, but most importantly there was Kidagakash among them. Throwing myself on her spear would probably make for a quick and not unforeseeable end to the Games. Then again, District One had won four out of the previous ten Games, including Shang’s.

“Li Shang,” said Maleficent smoothly, getting to her feet. She had shed her jacket to reveal her slinky green dress, more suited to a party than a Reaping in the town square, and sashayed across to him to extended one glossy-nailed hand. Shang, arms folded across his chest, looked down at her extended arm and then back up again. I started to like him a little bit more. “I’m honoured to have the opportunity to train under you.”

Shang only trained the tributes; he did not work throughout the years with those of us who were training to be Careers. That was taken on by several of the other former winners, and was something which my father still occasionally did to keep a connection with the Games that had made him the man he was today.

“Maleficent Le Fay, was it not?” he replied. He had the sort of crisp tones that you normally heard coming from the Peacekeepers. “And Fa Ping.” His eyes turned to me, stern and unforgiving. For a split second, I had to fight the urge to quail, but then the threatening gaze made my shoulders fall back, my eyes narrow in return. “Son of Fa Zhou, of course. Perhaps it is I who should be honoured.”

I didn’t give him a reply, feeling the way that his voice was taunting me. For various years, I’d received those sort of comments from the other children – Ping too, but to a lesser extent when I was the one who got into fights at school, broke a bully’s nose when I was ten, kicked a boy in the crotch when he tried to grab my ass at age thirteen. What ass he was trying to grab, I still had no idea to that day.

“In any case, I look forward to starting my work with you tomorrow,” he said, and turned to leave. Maleficent levelled a glare at his back that was utterly worthy of her name, and I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing out how vexed she obviously was. Then Chi Fu ushered us from the room, and I prepared myself for what I knew full well could be the last chance I ever had to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

My charade lasted a full three minutes after I walked into the Remake Centre. Maleficent was swept away by a group of three women, all in bright colours and bickering already, as a cluster of men descended upon me and whisked me away for ‘preliminary treatment’. I tried to protest, to fend them off, but one of them withdrew scissors with a declaration that my current clothes would be utterly unsuitable, and then I heard the whip of them slicing up the back of my shirt.

As the fabric fell open, the men fell still, and deadly silence covered the room. I still had my hands clutched across my front, but knew that the clasp of my bra would be showing, that beneath the loose shirt lay the betrayal of my body. I turned slowly to face the three men.

Two looked shocked; one, shocked and angry. I bit my lip, entirely unsure of what to say, when the doors were flung open and a man walked in. He was significantly older than the others, white-haired though I had hardly ever seen anybody from the Capitol allowing their hair to turn white, wearing red and gold robes. I knew already that his name was Wei, and that he was one of the most famous and experienced stylists, who had worked with District One for well over two decades now. He was known as the Emperor of Stylists, and had probably been no small part in our recent victories.

“What is going on here?” he said.

The three helpers turned to him, now looking more nervous than they had before. As the panic started to fade I could tell them apart: one shorter, rounder, with elaborate facial hair and striking red tattoos; one the tallest man I had ever seen, with a shaved head and face shiny-round with surgeries; one thin, with unnaturally thick black hair and a faint gold tinge across his whole body. The one with the red tattoos said: “It’s a girl.”

“Impossible,” said Wei. He turned to me, piercing dark eyes. “What is the matter?”

I uncrossed my arms and swallowed nervously, making fists at my sides as I drew myself up as tall as possible. “They’re right. My name is Fa Mulan. I came here in my brother Ping’s place.”

The gold-skinned helper started to declare how we’re all going to be put to death for this, even as his tall, round colleague tried to calm him down with muttered placations. Wei simply looked at me, steadily, so long that my shaking slowed and eventually stopped altogether.

“This has happened once before,” he intoned. “Though then, it was a boy taking his brother’s place with volunteering. He was nineteen. When the Capitol discovered him, he was killed, and his brother bought in, without the incident being made public.”

“My brother wouldn’t survive the Games.” If I hadn’t been frightened for him before Kidagakash was drawn, I would have been now. “I...” My voice almost failed me. “I thought I might have a chance.”

Wei’s gaze hadn’t flicked; his hands, folded behind him, had not moved. “Perhaps. If you do not win, the deception will be discovered.”

“You cannot be serious,” the man with red tattoos said, turning with anger building in his face. It made his tattoos look more red-on-pink, standing out less. “If we don’t say this now, then we’re all to blame!”

“The Capitol will punish us anyway,” the gold-skinned one snapped. “We’ll probably all be put to death for this! It’s a nightmare!”

Wei silenced them with a harsh movement of his hand, slicing sideways like a knife. He was famous, as well, for managing both the male and female tributes for District One rather than having a partner. I wondered whether, had he been from one of the Districts, he might have taken part in one of the Hunger Games, whether he might even have won.

“We can arrange for you to swap back again,” he said. “Now. It will not be easy, but it will be possible, and you might escape being punished.”

“I won’t send my brother to death,” I replied.

“Then you must be ready to fight a double battle,” said Wei. I nodded quickly, before he could change his mind, and he turned to his assistants. “Chien-Po, stay with me. Yao, Ling, leave.” Red tattoos and gold skin left, leaving behind shiny face. I watched them warily. “So first, we will turn you into a boy.”

  
  
  
  


For the first terrifying moment I thought that they were planning surgeries, but Wei said that would, beside anything else, be far too dangerous. They decided to play up my – or at least ‘Ping’s’ – androgyny, instead. My skin scrubbed, hair washed and cut, and most of my body hair removed, I was allowed to wrap up in a loose shirt and pants again before being bought in to lunch. I was most of the way through the first course when Maleficent joined us, smelling of perfume, with her hair now in shining ringlets and her skin glowing. Wei sat down opposite us, steepling his hands together. He did not eat, and Maleficent merely picked at a few pieces of fruit, leaving me to doubtless look like a pig as I filled up. I didn’t much care. I would need my strength in training, after all, never mind the Arena.

“There are several other very skilled stylists in other Districts this year,” said Wei. For a moment, my eyes flickered across to Maleficent, wondering whether she might try sweet words on him as well, but she was merely smiling, eyes unreadable. “Therefore, this year I want to do something a little different.

“There has been a lot of focus on the luxury of your items in previous years. This year, I want something a little sharper, a little harder. Diamonds, not gold. You will have clothing that hints at armour, and I want to portray you both as very competent warriors. I have spoken to Li Shang, and to the other trainers, and I know that you are. So I want power from you, presence. Give me that, and I will make you brilliant.”

It was not a promise, a wild gesture; it was a statement. And, from the Emperor of Stylists, I could believe it.

Makeup, hair and clothing passed in a whirl, and I wondered how any of this could possibly be interesting to the people of the Capitol. My interest in the Games, whilst growing up, was based entirely on the fact that I knew I would one day be a part of them. It was always tactics, always searching for details, as my father pointed out things that I did not notice when I was younger, but came to anticipate over the years. How the stylists worked to get sponsors, how the tributes were given characters to play in interviews, the difference that could be won just by being aware of the cameras all around them. It was research, spread across the lifetime, and I could hardly think how it would be interesting to someone to whom it would never be a case of life-or-death.

Maleficent was wearing a gown which appeared to be made out of silver filigree over shimmering silver-and-opal silk. The filigree took the faint shape of armour, whilst the form of her hair, with long crystal shards, made something between a helm and a crown. My own clothes were even more armour-like, stiff and stern, all Lucite and silver, and I held a Lucite sword aloft as the white horses drawing our carriage started forwards.

The sound of the crowd was a roar, a wall of sound that swallowed us up, surrounded us in flashing lights and flying cameras like falling stars. I glittered among them, heard people calling my name, saw the shine of diamonds and precious metals in the crowd that our District would have created.

I did not dare to look around to see the chariots of the other Districts behind us, to see what their stylists had created. The path was ours, untouched by anyone before us, though flowers and cheap imitation crystals showered down all around us. Maleficent caught some of the flowers from the air and, smirking, crushed them in her hand. The crowd went wild for her, and I wondered if she was going to be _cruel_ , something which few tributes ever attempted because of how it could backfire.

Once we pulled up in front of President Yensid’s mansion, we were finally given the opportunity to see the others. A variety of costumes appeared on the screen as the President made his annual speech; great speakers above us boomed out his voice to the crowd, but we were much further below and it was muffled. I took the opportunity to look around at the array of carriages, the people, the colours. Most of us still looked up at the screen, enraptured at the sights of each other and of ourselves, and I realised with a pang that there was an ‘ _us_ ’, that we were in at least some way a group. Even the line between forced and volunteered tribute blurred this year once I was taken into account.

Once again, we were paraded around the grounds, and then escorted back into the prep area. I was shaking as I put down my sword, and had to be helped out of the chariot by Chien-Po, who still seemed to like me rather more than the scowling Ling and Yao who stood behind him. The three women fluttered around Maleficent like butterflies, cooing and petting her as she strode through them.

The Emperor looked at us, smiled, and nodded. We had done well enough.


	4. Chapter 4

I managed to get through the evening with a minimum of calamities, apart from an unfortunate slip of the finger in the shower which left me smelling rather more floral than befitted the warrior image that Wei was trying to create. I tried to find something more manly before dinner, and achieved something faintly citrusy that was probably at least a slight improvement. Despite the adrenaline pounding through my veins for most of the day, I felt fidgety, as if I hadn’t done enough exercise. I had missed my morning run for the Reaping, my evening training session for the makeover and parade. My muscles itched beneath my skin, and in a sudden reversal of appetite I found myself picking at my dinner instead of wolfing it down as I would have done earlier.

Chi Fu congratulated Wei at great length, enough to make me want to squirm and look away. Shang was in the room as well, pacing rather than sitting at the table, and watching us carefully. Where Wei had looked me over for what style he could find, Shang was looking for fighters. I hoped that I would come up better in that department.

After dinner, Maleficent gracefully dismissed herself, and Chi Fu looked at me in a way which made it clear that I was supposed to do the same. I went back to my room, changed into loose pyjamas and tried to sleep, but it was useless. Even after I picked the last of the tiny fragments of fake crystal out of my ear – it felt as if someone had scored a direct hit with a handful of the blasted things – I couldn’t stop my mind or my restless legs.

Finally, I swung my legs out of bed again, got up, and pulled on the first set of clothes that I found in the drawers. Being on only the second floor – they wouldn’t put us on the ground, in case a reception area left us with the slightest bit less area than the other Districts – we were still engulfed by the city, surrounded by life and lights. Even in District One, the most affluent of the districts, there was generally a working day. We still worked, after all, for the Capitol, and though the goods we produced were luxury the ways of producing them were not always so. The machinery jobs or the design works were better than the fur treatments or tending the vineyards, but they were still jobs. I wasn’t sure what most people in the Capitol did.

Names and faces were emblazoned across the screens. An interview was taking place with the winner of the 70th Games, the girl from District Four who had been spat at by Kidagakash. She had said before that it might as well have been a blessing, marking her as worthy to win the Games. I doubted that Kidagakash herself would feel the same.

Of course, they were repeating that story again. Although I knew that it was far from unheard of for some of the people in other Districts to marry young, it was not so much the done thing in District One. And we tended to know which people were going to be Tributes. I wondered what it could possibly be like growing up to know that the Games had claimed one of your parents, and how Kidagakash could possibly have decided that to go into the Games herself. I watched ghostly images dance across the screen: her practice sessions, her interviews, that iconic moment when she spat in the girl’s face four years ago.

Any other year, the Gamemakers would have been looking for a scandal, a story to make this year at least as interesting as the last. I might have been that story, were it not for her.

Finally, even with my muscles complaining from a lack of use, the effort of the day began to creep in as tiredness, and I went back to bed. It was a long time, though, before I managed to get to sleep.

  
  
  
  


The Capitol seemed to be noisy twenty-four hours a day. I woke up at six-thirty in the morning without even the need for an alarm, after getting up at that time for as many years as I could remember. Somewhere in the night, someone had obviously entered my room despite the locked door: clothes had been laid out on the dresser. I frowned, but figured that if my cover had been blown, I would have been dragged out by the Peacekeepers already. I wrestled my way through the shower, dressed in the baggy combat pants and thick tunic that has been left for me and felt grateful that I was so flat-chested that a bra was unlikely to be needed beneath the secure tunic.

Maleficent looked rather less impressed with her version of the outfit as we met at the breakfast table. I considered myself lucky for the way that it hid my figure, but I doubted that Maleficent considered it the same way. She scowled at a grapefruit whilst I made my way through porridge, fruit and nuts, tea, and sausage sandwiches, and Chi Fu looked faintly disgusted in my direction.

“Glad to see that someone’s got an appetite,” said a voice from behind me, making me almost choke on the last part of the sandwich. “You’ll be working that off today.”

I turned, wiping ketchup off my mouth with the back of my hand, to find Shang standing behind my chair and smiling in a slightly dangerous way. It was the exact same look that the trainers tended to wear right before they introduced us to some new exercise that they’d designed to make us feel as exhausted as possible. He nodded sharply to Chi Fu, rather more respectfully to Wei, and then took a seat beside the latter.

“You’ve got plenty of physical training behind you from the last few years, of course,” Shang continued as he sat down. “So I want you to refresh some of your other skills instead. Trapping, knot-tying, camouflage. Alternate between those and the physical training, to keep yourselves on track. And stay away from the spears; they’re Kidagakash’s main weapon.”

It seemed that I was not the only one who was concerned by the She-Devil of District Four. The name that the media had given her, and which had stuck, did not help.

“I advise that you train separately,” said Wei. “Concentrate on rounding your strengths. I will talk to you again on the last day, and we will decide what your private display will be.”

I wondered whether Wei expected me to kill Maleficent myself, but the man’s face was unreadable. We both knew that even if I won, it would only be delaying the fact that I would be found out. There wasn’t really a chance for me, there never had been. But maybe if I won, they would have to treat Ping like the victor, and could not afford to kill my whole family. I could feel the goalposts moving each time that I thought about it again, what I had done seeming more and more ridiculous

Luckily, Maleficent answered for me: “Very well.”

Despite the solid breakfast, my stomach roiled as we took the elevator down to the huge basement and the training area. We were some of the earliest, behind only the District Two tributes, who were already swinging swords and seemed to be in deep discussion over them. Frowning, Shang set off towards them, doubtless to tell them off for getting an early start before we had heard the rules. From tomorrow, we would be allowed to begin training as early as we could bear, but today we were supposed to hear the rules first.

I scanned the area, taking in the various stands and fighting floors, targets and weights and dummies, then turned my attention to the other tributes as they started to arrive. Most of them arrived in pairs, some with trainers in tow, Eric from District Four bought down by his mentor, a man with a long grey ponytail and an old-fashioned suit, who then retired to the viewing area. I knew what that was going to mean, and wished that I wasn’t in my Career-expected place at the front of the group.

Kidagakash was going to make an entrance. I folded my arms across my chest and deliberately did not look over my shoulder, even as I heard some of the other tributes gasp. I realised abruptly that I could see her reflection in one of the shining shields hanging on the opposite wall. Where the rest of us were wearing tunics and cargo pants, loose training clothes, she was wearing bright blue cloth in some sort of bikini and skirt, the colour matching her tattoos. They must have been District Four clothes, hidden so that they would not be taken away from her.

It was, I was sure, a good early start to the intimidation tactics. I wasn’t in the mood for it. The head trainer, a deceptively beautiful woman with golden curls and lilac eyes, blinked for a moment but held her composure. Another person I was starting to like out of this whole mess.

“Thank you for joining us,” she said, and I pursed my lips to prevent a smile from creeping out as Kidagakash strode right to the front of the group, tossed her white hair back, and regarded the trainer with a cool gaze. “Now, if you will allow me to continue.”

I had known for years how the training rooms worked, but some of the non-Career tributes might not have done. We were free to move, to try things out as we wished. My strength had always been hand-to-hand combat, but I was prepared to use some hand weapons just to keep my skill up, and I had a good eye for aiming although I was better with a bow and arrow than with knives.

The trainer concluded her speech, paused for a moment, and then clapped her hands as if to demonstrate that we were dismissed. Helga and Rourke from District Two merely exchanged a glance and started immediately back to the swords, maces and other heavy hand weapons that clustered together. Some of the other tributes were still looking around nervously, as well as stealing looks at Kidagakash who remained in place, looking around the room as if she was taking in an art gallery. I rolled my eyes, turned sharply away, and headed over to the climbing area. Wooden and metal poles, ropes of various fabrics and a false rock wall made up an area to toy with. Another one of my strengths, and I wanted a more gentle warm up.

I started by shimmying up the thinnest wooden pole, turned, and leapt from the top of it to the widest wooden one. That was wide enough to sit on, and I tucked my feet in to look around. I would only need half an hour at the most on the climbing, and I had three days to work with.

It was standard for Career tributes to start off with weapons, or perhaps with other feats of strength – weightlifting, climbing, physical things – to show their dominance. I supposed that I had done that as well. Maleficent was working with bows and arrows, Helga and Rourke were swinging a sword and bolas respectively, and Eric was hefting weights that made the muscles on his arms stand out like knots on some of the ropes that surrounded me. Standard careers.

Some of the ones from the poorer Districts were heading for the weapons as well – to learn how to use them, I suspected. I saw Kocoum from Nine learning to use a knife, Rapunzel from Eleven using a sling with surprising accuracy for a newcomer, Jim from Three practicing hand-to-hand combat with Shang himself.

One of the ropes beside me twitched, and I turned to see little Pocahontas climbing fast, hand over hand, up the slick unknotted rope which even I would normally have some trepidation over using. She smiled at me slyly as we drew level, and I could not help smiling back, before she turned, swung on the rope a short distance, and landed neatly on the top of the high parallel bars that sat not far away. I didn’t often see people more agile in the air than me during training; District One was all about the heavy weaponry, after all, and I was a bit of an anomaly. Were it not that I was Fa Zhou’s daughter – or, here, son – I would be thought one step from a coward.

Pocahontas hooked her knees over the bar and swung upside down to survey the room. From her tunic, she pulled some areas of rope which she must have taken from the knot-tying stand, and began making patterns using both hands and her teeth, before twisting them down into complex knots. One or two of them, with loops, she hooked over her wrist before moving on to the next.

I realised that I had been spending too long watching everyone else, and swung to climb down the pole which I had been sitting on. With the metal, I decided to show off just a little, in case anyone was looking, and kicked up into a handstand against the pole, hooked my feet behind, and sat up onto it before climbing, hands-only, for the rest of the distance. It was strange to see metal; I wondered why they bothered, other than to give us another way to work our muscles. A few more of the ropes and wooden poles were enough to make me start feeling bored, and I turned back to the floor feeling more limber.

Shang had said that we should work on other skills than fighting. Not a standard Career tactic. But as I turned to consider my options, leaning towards the edible and poisonous plants, I was surprised to see Kidagakash sitting calmly at the camouflage table, painting green and brown patterns up one leg, and talking to the District Twelve tributes also there. Insects were closer than plants, just next door, and I veered in that direction instead. The trainer looked surprised and pleased to have someone so early, especially a Career, and I quickly realised that I had absolutely no idea about any of the insects.

It was more difficult to learn about insects and eavesdrop at the same time than I had expected, but I gave it my best shot as I tried to learn how to not poison myself with beetles. From what I could tell, Kidagakash – ‘Kida’ as she seemed to have invited the others to call her – was listening to Milo and Cinderella talk about their lives in District Twelve, asking what it was like there. Surprisingly independent, from what I overheard, if very difficult. Cinderella talked about going hungry as if it was perfectly normal there, not an occasional but tragic happening, even as she painted flowery patterns on Milo’s face. He looked strange without his glasses, and kept going to push them up his nose anyway, getting streaks of paint on his fingers.

I wondered why they hadn’t gone to weapons, like most of the others hand. Wondered whether they had just given up already.

I didn’t want to kill people. But twenty-three people were not going to be coming out of the Arena, and I wanted to be the one that did. By the time that I was doing better than chance on the insects – not a lot better than chance, but at least my chances of killing myself were decreasing sharply – Milo looked like a walking art class and Kida was painting a bird onto her thigh.

“Tell you what,” I said to the trainer. “I’ll come back again this afternoon, then tomorrow. See if I can get this to stick.”

She smiled, as if that was the nicest thing that a tribute ever said to her, and agreed to see me later. It was getting ever easier to respond to Ping’s name. I headed over to knife-throwing, and was surprised to find myself joined by another of the tributes, Aladdin from District Eight. He looked maybe fifteen or sixteen, not too skinny but with a sort of hungry look around his eyes and a prominence of his jawbone which said that his life hadn’t been too easy.

“You’re Fa Ping, right?” he said, as he drew level with me and picked another of the bandoliers. The trainer set about showing him how to hold the knives properly for throwing, how to feel the weight of them. “Your father was a Victor.”

I could hear the capital letter in the word; a lot of people used it. Of course, growing up with my father and knowing about the nightmares, the fears that still plagued him, I wondered whether there was any such thing as a victor in the Games. “Yeah,” I replied. “Aladdin, right?”

He gave a sheepish smile and ran a hand through his thick hair. “You’ve got a good memory.”

“If I can put it to work on the plants and insects, it might even come in handy.” I grinned and threw the first knife. It stuck nicely in the target, but a way out on the bullseye compared to where I had wanted. They weren’t balanced the way that the ones at home were, and I wondered whether these had been used for training for years now, getting more worn with each round of tributes. Aladdin chuckled. “District Eight. That means that I have you to thank for this.”

I nodded down at the tunic. This time his laughter was a little more self-depreciating. “Yeah, I suppose so. Though I work more in the dyeing areas.”

The homophone stung. He threw one of the knives, a little sloppily, but it almost stuck in the bullseye before falling to the ground. “Hey, that’s better than I could do for years,” I said.

“Let me get back to you in a few years, then,” he replied. I winced, realising how it must have sounded.

“Sorry.” As if to demonstrate my words, my next knife decided to bounce off the hilt of the previous one and ricochet into the floor, sticking there instead. “Well, that shows how much skill I’ve got. Knives are... not my strong point.”

“I think I’ve got the general gist,” said Aladdin. “Blunt end goes in my hand, pointy end goes in someone else.”

 _I might have to kill this boy._ My own thoughts disgusted me.

“Sounds like a good general strategy,” said the trainer, saving me from having to reply. “But for now, let’s go for getting the pointy end in the right someone else, shall we?”


	5. Chapter 5

It was shortly after lunch when Rourke joined me on the weightlifting. He was most of two metres tall, with defined muscles and an even more defined jaw, and grabbed a twenty-four kilo kettlebell in each hand as if it was nothing. I had both hands wrapped around the handle of a twenty kilo one, and could feel the weight pushing at the boundaries of what my muscles could do.

“I’ve got my mentor talking to yours already,” he said, without bothering with a preamble. “I want you in the main pack.”

“Who else have you spoken to?” I replied, lowering the weight down and then lifting with it again.

“Your other tribute, Maleficent. Eric from Four. And I’m considering the boy from six, Shan Yu.”

Shan Yu made all of the other tributes look small by comparison, and there were some powerfully-built tributes this year. It was a standard pack for the most part, mostly Careers but with a possible opening for one or two others who looked very promising. “Not the She-Devil?”

He hesitated for a moment – a hesitation, not a pause – and then did another pair of curls with the weights. “She’s made it clear that she doesn’t want a pack. According to her mentor, she’s not even paying much attention to what she says.”

“People will sponsor her anyway,” I said. “She’s famous already.”

“She doesn’t need to survive the bloodbath,” said Rourke, and I knew exactly what he meant already. If the pack attacked her all at once, not even she could hold them all off. By the sounds of things, he already had five people, and I would make a sixth. We would be dangerous. “Take her out, the field gets changed dramatically.”

“Thank you for the offer.” I hefted the weight right above my head and held it there, feeling the way that the muscles in my back and stomach tensed. I turned to face him. “But no thank you. I’m not an animal, and I’m not in the mood to be part of your pack.”

The weight didn’t quite land on his feet when I dropped it, as I sort of hoped that it would, but it came pretty close. I turned away and headed back to the edible insects. Hopefully this time I would remember which ones were edible or, at least, show caution with the ones that I wasn’t sure about.

 

 

After that, the other tributes avoided me, and left me to my own devices for the rest of the training time. It meant two days of relative peace and quiet, at least, during which I managed to get to a point where, between edible insects and edible plants, I might actually be able to feed myself in the Arena if they had another year with relatively low food supplies – something which would not be a first. I kept away from most of the hand weapons, kept my head down, and generally knew that I was not acting as a Career tribute would. It gave me more opportunity to watch the others, though, to see Quasimodo lift and throw a forty kilo kettlebell like it was nothing, to see Jessie turn rope into a lasso that she could throw a good ten metres with accuracy, to see Tarzan explain some details of the edible plants to the trainer rather than the other way around.

If the kids from the poorer Districts could survive the bloodbath, then they had a good chance of outrunning or out-thinking the Careers. I wasn’t sure whether or not that would be a good thing for me. If I wanted to win, then twenty-three people were going to have to die, by my hand or someone else’s.

No survivors, and only one victor. Nobody ever _survived_ the Games, just came out the other side of it.

It was late morning on the third day, and our last chance to get some practice in, before somebody spoke to me again. I was trying – rather unsuccessfully – to make fish hooks out of bits of stick or stray metal, a chair beside me scraped back and someone sat down. I ignored them and bit down on the piece of metal, feeling it slowly bend beneath my teeth.

“Your name is Ping, if I recall.” The accent of District Four made me freeze in place, the female voice amused beside me. “You told Rourke to go to hell.”

“Nuhkuh-” I realised that I still had one hand part way into my mouth, withdrew it and the nail, and wiped my lips with the back of my hand. “Not quite in those words.”

“The spirit was there.”

I looked sideways, warily, to watch as Kidagakash sat beside me, plucked out a few of her hairs, and started twisting them together before picking up a shard of bone from the table and binding it in.

“Rourke said that you’d told him that you weren’t interested in a pack, either.”

“Actually, I said that I didn’t want _his_ pack.” She glanced sideways to catch my gaze, her blue eyes large and luminous, and gave a sly smile. There was a little notch in her upper left canine, and I wondered why her stylists had left it there until she raised her makeshift fish hook to her mouth and used her teeth – or at least, the notch – to hold it while her fingers worked. “He seems to think there can only be one.”

“The Games aren’t exactly a team sport,” I replied with a sneer in my voice, tugging my piece of string round the nail and looking at it. It didn’t look particularly impressive, although I supposed that I might catch a particularly stupid fish. “You must know that Rourke plans to kill you as soon as possible.”

I wasn’t sure why I said it. Perhaps I didn’t want to see five people gang up on one, just so that they could kill her. Perhaps Kidagakash’s cool behaviour was just annoying me. But in any case, the words left my lips, and there was no response as she ripped a small scrap of fabric from the edge of her skirt and tied it onto her fish hook. It made it noticeably prettier, and I suspected that fish would think the same.

“I assumed that someone would,” she replied finally. She didn’t sound in the least bit concerned, and I felt a flash of anger.

“You know, you think you’ve got this Games already won, but maybe you shouldn’t be so sure.” I rose to my feet to address her, now talking down. There was a distinct lessening of noise in the rest of the hall, but Kidagakash did not look round, just twisted and played with the bone-hair-fabric _thing_ in her hands. “I’ve seen you talking some of the other Districts into trusting you, playing mind games with them. Maybe they’re smarter than you think, though. Maybe they won’t just sit down quietly and let you betray them.”

The fish hook in her hands stopped twisting, and she wrapped her fingers around it one by one. Her eyes stared straight ahead, the smile fading, and when she spoke again she sounded far older than eighteen.

“Maybe the world is not quite as you think, Fa Ping. Maybe you should not assume things about me either.”

Luckily, it was at that moment that the Gamemakers rang the bell announcing lunch, and our individual demonstrations. As the District One boy, I would be the first up, and I had already agreed with Shang that I would show my hand-to-hand combat skills against him. I stayed in the room, limbering up and stretching, as the rest of the tributes left and the Gamemakers, on their balcony, started to look round in something that might have been vague interest.

Shang remained in the room as well, caught my gaze, and nodded. We walked up to the sword-fighting floor in front of the balcony, planning to appropriate it because of its better position, and I bowed from the waist, rose up, and lifted one hand straight into the air.

"Fa Ping of District One, son of Fa Zhou winner of the 50th Hunger Games, presenting.”

That had been on Wei’s advice; all of the Gamemakers would know who I was, but it never hurt to make a bit more of a splash and get their attention just a little more focused. A couple nodded and looked impressed; I turned smartly, walked to face Shang at three paces distance, and we both bowed from the waist.

I had kept away from hand-to-hand fighting for the entire three days, to ensure that none of the other Tributes – save Maleficent, if she had paid attention in earlier months – would know about my skill in it. I punched, Shang blocked, but when he went for the counter-strike I twisted beneath his blow and drove my elbow into his stomach. He grabbed my collar, going to pull me up, but instead I dropped my weight to the ground, throwing him over me.

Though I dared not look up to the balcony, I could see the surprise on Shang’s face. Ping was good with throwing knives, a bow and arrow, a sling; I, _Mulan_ , was the hand-to-hand fighter. Shang came in once a year, just to observe and see what ‘talent’ would be forthcoming in the following years.

Pressing my advantage, I grabbed his arm and bent it, rolling him onto his front with one knee on the back of his neck as I turned his wrist at an unnatural angle. I mimed driving a knife into his throat, then jumped back to my feet and let him rise as well.

Fifteen minutes was too long to spend in consistent hand-to-hand combat, but we sparred for perhaps six or seven before the sweat streaming down my face and back became too much to bear, and I stepped back and bowed to Shang to say that I was done. I could hear murmurs from the balcony above, and hoped that they were impressed. Turning, I bowed to them again, then took a hammock from the appropriate stand, bundled up a twenty-eight kilo weight in it, and slung it around my back, tying it in place. Some more comments, still inaudible, came my way, but I was not finished. Heading to the climbing poles, I headed over to the one that had been coated with slicking paint – one which Esmeralda, from Seven, had made the mistake of trying to climb the day before, only to end up on her rear before clearing three metres.

I removed my belt, which I had been wearing unnoticed for the day, and whipped it around the pole to pull my weight back against it. It was a trick which I had not been taught, but had stumbled upon: that the higher pressure and the rough fabric of my belt lining could overcome the slickness of the pole.

It was perhaps ten metres tall, marked lower down where people had started to try to climb, but shining further up where no-one else had reached. Already tired from fighting, I was regretting my choice – belt and knees alternating; I was going to be bruised after this – but gritted my teeth and continued up, hauling half my weight again over my shoulder as I continued upwards. Panting, I finally reached the top, hooked the weight over it, and rose on shaking legs to stand upright, arms outstretched, at the very top of the pillar.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I gathered what of my voice I could, making sure that they were looking my way before I bowed again. “My thanks to you.”

I did not go to the lunch hall where the others would now be eating, or perhaps fretting and toying with their food. Stumbling into the lift, I rested my forehead against the cool metal as it whipped up the two storeys to the District One apartment, then sighed as I exited, headed through, and flopped onto the couch.

Wei appeared from one of the other rooms, his assistants and Chi Fu following him like shadows. “Back already?”

“Yes,” I sighed, too tired for beating about the bush. I kicked off my shoes and put my feet up, sinking deeper into the soft cushions. “But I think it went well. I kicked Shang’s ass, then climbed a while.”

An almost imperceptible smile was on Wei’s face for a second, then gone again before I could be wholly sure that I had seen it at all. I tried to put aside the unsettling feeling that for every step I tried to take, someone else had already moved the floor beneath me.

 

 

“So, Ping,” said the interviewer as I sat down beside her. “A score of ten. I’m sure people weren’t expecting anything less from the son of Fa Zhou.”

Her name was Snow White, and she had been hosting the interviews since before I was born. Not that you would know it with her tight black curls, pale skin, red lips and the silver snowflakes tattooed into her skin.

“Well,” I replied, “I simply couldn’t imagine letting my father down, or my family. It’s very important to me to honour them.”

The audience fluttered to themselves. Maleficent had gone before me to interview, flirtatious and devilish, dangerously sexy in a way that completely belied her age. In her wake, I had agreed with Wei that I would be honourable, humble, determined. I feared that it would seem underwhelming, but he had reassured me that it would strike a chord that had not been reached in many years.

“Your father set a high bar during the Quarter Quell. Did you grow up knowing about that?”

I nodded, hands in my lap. Dressed in silver and with crystal and glitter lining my face like a helmet, I look almost like a warrior once again. “Yes, growing up I was aware of it. Of how the Games can... influence a whole person’s life. Hearing my name come from the Reaping was... sudden, and yet so expected.”

Snow White smiled at me sympathetically. “You’re a very brave young man, Ping.”

Despite the terse exterior which I was supposed to put forward, I couldn’t help just a touch of a smile. “Thank you. I know it’s uncommon for a reaped tribute from my District to come through, people are... so brave, so willing to volunteer for younger people.” I did not mention Maleficent by name, but it was meant for her. I also didn’t speak too blatantly of the habit of Career tributes of training – it was, after all, technically illegal, even if it did gain us so many winners over the years – but it was a reference to that as well. “Apparently I’m the youngest District One tribute in twenty-eight years.”

“Exactly right!” Snow White smiled at me, then tilted her head to the audience. “He’ll be putting me out of a job at this rate.” The crowd laughed a little, but it was the same sort of reaction that they would give to any comment that seemed aim for a response.

I made myself look faintly offended, but amused. “Goodness! I would never do such a thing, my dear! You do such a wonderful job!”

She looked amazed as I placed a hand on her arm, then turned to the camera and said, _sotto voce_ and behind her hand: “I like this one. Might keep him myself.”

This time, the audience laughed a little more enthusiastically. Impulsively, I stood up, spun Snow White under one arm, and pulled her back to my chest, wrapping an arm around her protectively. She gave a squeal of surprise, and the audience gasped, but the atmosphere was still excitable. This was well outside what Wei had intended me to do, but it seemed that people liked it. I clutched Snow White’s hand and struck a noble posture.

“Come, my fair maiden! We shall elope!”

Snow White was giggling helplessly in my arms as the buzzer sounded, and the audience gave a disappointed groan. We pulled apart like displaced lovers, with mock gasps, and then I bent to kiss the back of her hand.

“Alas, it seems our time is short. Until next time.”

The audience cooed over us, even as Snow White threw a wink to the cameras, let me wave as I left, as then stroked down her skirt to collect herself before Helga from District Two arrived. I should have returned to the seats, my chair in the front row conspicuously empty, but without even consciously thinking I strode offstage instead, hiding behind the curtain from the hundreds of camera-eyes of the Capitol. The prep teams clustered there parted for me, and as I made it to mine, my knees almost gave way befrore Chien-Po caught me and propped me back onto my feet again.

I looked at Wei and cocked an eyebrow. His expression didn’t change, but I got a feeling of satisfaction from him anyway. “You made an impression. That is important.”

Shang appeared at his elbow. Unlike most of his time in training, he was now wearing a shirt, which made him distinctly less distracting than he could be at other times. Although I had barely given it thought then or since, his bare chest had provided an occasional point of focus for me whilst I tuned out and allowed my fingers to work on knots by themselves. “I want you to get back on stage and watch the other interviews,” he said, pointing where I had come from, before I had a chance to even open my mouth. “I want you to know who you’re going to be fighting.”

“I’ve seen them for the last three days,” I replied. My hands were shaking, and I was tired from playing around on stage and being Snow White’s knight. It had been a few years since a tribute had last walked offstage, and when they had been thrust back on to hurry to their seat the audience had been laughing _at_ them, not with them. “I’m sure that I know them well enough to kill them.”

The words came out more bitter than I intended, and I saw anger flash in Shang’s eyes. His jaw tensed, and I was sure that he was just about to shout like the drill sergeant he would in another life have easily made.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” I added, pulling a shard of Lucite out of my hair and dropping it to the floor. On the stage, I had looked like a warrior, but now I was just starting to feel like I had been thrown through a window. “Big day tomorrow, after all. Lots of lives to end.”

Thankfully, the cameras weren’t backstage to hear comments like that. I saw Shang’s face go red with fury, and even Wei’s eyebrows moved upwards a little, but I was already turning and ready to leave, sick of the ceremony and spectacle to prepare the Capitol to watch our deaths. The anger had been coming and going in waves, but now, for the first time, one crested high within me and crashed down with all the fury of the storm.


	6. Part Two - The Fighter

This was it. The first day of the Games, the last day of my life as I knew it. Dressed all in smoke-grey, with a patch sewn on my shoulder in the shape of a dragon – my district token, sent in by my father – I tried to breathe steadily as I stepped onto the circular plate for the launch.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many people I would kill, who they would be. Huge Shan Yu? Sharp-tongued Megara? Shy Cinderella? There had been tributes in the past who had simply waited for most of the violence to burn out, and only had to kill one or two people in order to win, but the cameras would be on me after everything that I had said. The Gamemakers hated it when tributes tried to avoid fighting; they would hate it even more if the focus of the moment, Fa Ping, shied away.

Unless, of course, Kidagakash killed me before I could even get out of the bloodbath.

“Thank you,” I mouthed to Wei as my platform began to rise into the bright white light above me. He smiled, the first time that I had really seen him do so, and bowed his head to me. Maybe if I insured that I got myself blown up when I died, then my secret would go with me. Maybe Ping wouldn’t hate me for having to live my life. I had still done a fool thing.

Light engulfed me as I rose to the surface, so fierce that I winced for a moment before my eyes could adjust. Once I could see again, I realised that the world was grey as well, dusty and ragged at the edges. For a moment, I thought that I was in District Thirteen, but surely even the Gamemakers would not send us there.

It was the ruins of a city, with twisted metal and shattered concrete stabbing out of the ground around us. Beyond the metal plates, the ground was dry, hard-packed dirt which was still distinctly grey in colour. We stood in the centre of a circular building, possibly some sort of stadium, but large areas had collapsed outwards and less than half of the outer walls remained. At the centre of the arc formed by the plates was the Cornucopia, shining gold this year, a horn reaching into the sky and with objects spilling from its mouth. The best ones would be inside, with poorer-quality items further away from the entrance but closer to the tributes.

I glanced around at the others. Some of them still looked frightened, but most had at least a degree of determination now, and some had that hungry look which was not meant for food but for success. Some of them had started to think about _winning_. I had been wrestling with the concept for too long to be unbiased on the matter.

Time kept ticking down. We were all in the grey suits, loose fabric that was strapped with bands at the neck, wrists and ankles, and sturdy black boots with flexible soles. Clearly whoever designed the costumes was feeling kind this year; I hadn’t been able to block out the memories of the year that they made everyone enter the Arena naked.

Thirty seconds. Twenty-five seconds.

My eyes moved to the bounty spilling from the Cornucopia. Right in the mouth stood a spear, shining, a wicked looking hooked blade on the end, feathers and blue ribbons tied around the handle. I knew exactly the reason that it was there, but wondered who would challenge her for it.

Twenty seconds.

There would be no shortage of weapons in an Arena like this, even if I had to improvise, and no shortage of shelter either. My worries were going to be food and water, just as I had suspected or feared they might be. Some of the packs around me could have been medical, could have had water purification tablets in them. As for food, I could see no sign of plants here, and I didn’t know what animals or insects there might be.

Ten seconds.

My fists clenched at my sides, and my eyes caught a glint of gold amid the others, not more than thirty metres away. Brass knuckles. I had seen people laugh at such a weapon, but I knew that one good blow with them could protect your own hand and break bone on the other person. I could kill with that sort of weapon, with any number of weapons. I knew in an instant that I was going to fight, going to get into the bloodbath, rather than try to avoid it.

Five seconds.

Suddenly, there was movement beside me. We all jumped, sure that the landmines were going to go off even as the last five seconds were blared on horns across the Arena, but there was no explosion. The metal circles were at least three metres apart, wide enough that a landmine going off beneath one would not automatically set off the others, and enough that it is not possible to jump from one to another without a run-up. Or, at least, so we had presumed.

Pocahontas was on my right hand side, with her District partner Kocoum on the far side of her. As the clock hit five seconds, she suddenly flung herself towards him; her feet met with his outstretched hands and, with a thrust of his body, he threw her deeper towards the Cornucopia.

She hit the ground among the bounty items as the landmine under her metal plate discharged, too late to be of any use. The explosion hit me like a punch in the chest, and I closed my eyes against the flash as a shower of grit and gravel pattered against my right side, but I was still coiled for movement and, as the siren blared for us to move, I started to run.

I was fast, always had been, and the explosion had unsettled some of the others. From the corner of my eye I could see that not everyone was running, not straight away. I stepped straight over the first couple of small packs, not even breaking my stride, even as I heard the first scream from behind me. A bandolier of knives lay ahead of me, and I scooped them up and threw them over my shoulder, still running, hoping to get as close as I could to the Cornucopia before the first weapons starting moving in my direction.

I was almost in the shadow of it when the first attack fell. A line of pain cut across my arm, and I spun to see Maleficent, a deadly smile on her face, raising a second knife in my direction. Most people didn’t kill the other person from their District – unless you were a Career.

The second knife left her hand, flashing in my direction; I dropped to the ground, rolled, my hand falling onto a staff as I did so. As I rose to my feet again, I drew it with me. It was almost as tall as I was, dense wood with metal bands and spiked ends, and fit perfectly in my grip. This was another weapon that I had trained with for years.

I didn’t have time to face Maleficent with it, nor the need. I looked in her direction to see that the boy from Eight, Aladdin, was upon her with a scimitar in his hands and determination in his eyes. Even if I had wanted to intervene, I could not; Amelia, the girl from Three, was standing not four metres from me with a crossbow in her hands, drawing it back ready to fire.

Bracing the staff in my hands, I lunged towards her. The wood moved fluidly in my grip, heavy wooden end whipping round and whistling in the air, slamming into her thigh. The bolt of the crossbow went wild, flying over my shoulder and away, and I jumped in as she hit the floor. She tried to use the crossbow like a club against me, but I spun the staff to block it, knocking it aside effortlessly. The staff continued round, the other end following, and I flicked it so that the heavy pointed metal slammed into her temple.

I could hear the crack of her skull through the sounds of other fights breaking out behind me, see the way that her temple caved in as the skin split to spill red blood.

My first kill. _The_ first kill. The true beginning of the Games.

A cannon boomed overhead, and I imagined the viewers in the Capitol watching and cheering, the people of District Three saddened and angry. But there was no time to consider the fact as a second cannon roared, and I turned to see that the fighting was starting to thin, many people choosing to flee this year. Not long ago, over two-thirds of the field had died in the first hour. Since then, people tending towards more caution.

I saw Maleficent cutting down Aladdin with a ferocious slash across the neck, his body juddering and falling to the floor. A third boom. Then she turned, ignoring me completely, and I followed her gaze.

Right in the mouth of the Cornucopia, framed against the blackness, stood Kidagakash. She was wearing the same grey as the rest of us, but her white hair stood out, as did her ready stance and the spear in her hand. There was a smile on her face as she looked down at the people gathering in front of her. The pack – Rourke, Helga, Maleficent, Shan Yu, Eric – were ready, lined up in a semi-circle around her and ready to pounce.

They were completely ignoring me. I could have run, probably even stopped to make sure that I was collecting some good supplies. The pack were not focused on me, and though I could see Esmeralda and Quasimodo from Seven still picking at the edges for supplies, looking nervously towards the centre with every other step, I knew that they would not attack me. The thought did cross my mind to go after them; I could probably kill them both and eliminate a whole District.

I focused on collecting things that would be useful. The first thing that I grabbed was a charcoal-grey backpack, into which I started to stuff water, packs of dehydrated food, what I hoped was a box of medical supplies, a pair of heavy metal wristguards with knives protruding from the back that would serve me well in hand-to-hand combat.

Again, I glanced up, and was shocked into stillness by what I saw. Rourke and Helga, both armed with longswords, had attacked, and the ring of metal on metal echoed in and out of the Cornucopia’s mouth until it seemed to fill the air. Moving ferociously, Kida was holding them off, parrying blow after blow and even striking out herself to send them hopping back. Despite the danger I was putting myself in – there could have been another tribute lurking behind me with a bow and arrow, or even just a well-aimed rock – I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

Shan Yu was holding a huge club in his hands. It must have been put in there just to test the strength of the largest tributes, but he was holding it like a stick. It was a good metre long, as thick as my thigh, blackened and horrific. As Kida was forcing aside the two swords assailing her, he stepped in, raised it above his head, and bought it down in a terrible arc. My throat constricted, certain it would strike her, but then somehow she had stepped aside and kicked him in the face, leg high and forceful, knocking him away again as a scream of fury left her lips. He was thrown back; Helga slashed with her sword but was thrown aside again by a flash of the spear, end cutting her cheek and marking her with blood. I could see Kida panting, tiring, and something crystallised in me.

Rourke had invited me to be a part of this fight, and I had turned him down. Perhaps I had been premature in that.

I hooked the pack over my shoulders, staff now strapped to it, and drew one of the knives from the bandolier. It was about fifteen centimetres long, perfectly weighted for throwing if I needed it, but that was not my intention. Girding myself, I started to run, up the slope towards the Cornucopia and over the increasingly dense supplies that lay on the ground towards it. By now, Shan Yu was attacking as well, three weapons trained on one figure, Maleficent hanging back and watching cautiously, Eric standing beside her with a sword in his hand, shifting his grip on the hilt almost constantly, frowning.

Eric was closer to me, back exposed, more fixed on what was happening in front of him, and I had seen how good Maleficent’s reactions were. My speed increased as I drew closer, knife ready in my right hand, then as I reached him – Maleficent span, eyes widening – I grabbed his hair, wrenched his head back, and stabbed the knife up through the base of his skull.

The blade burst through his mouth in a punch of blood, and his body instantly went slack in my hands. I withdrew the knife and he fell to the ground, little more than a bag of flesh and bones.

They saw it, Rourke and Helga, though Shan Yu was still intent on his fight. “Pull back!” Rourke shouted, over another of Kidagakash’s infuriated cries, and then the pack was running, the Careers were running away from this demon in front of them with blood on her face and bruises on her arms and a spear still clutched in her hand.

Our eyes locked, the body of Eric lying between us, then Kidagakash straightened up and set her spear beside her. “I have no quarrel with you,” she said. If anything, her accent seemed stronger than before. “Go or stay, I do not care, unless you fight me. Then, I will kill you.”

Was she offering me the chance of an alliance? I frowned, uncertain. No, more likely she meant a truce, time without fighting at all rather than defending each other.

Hovercrafts started to buzz in overhead, and she shielded her eyes to look up at them for a moment. Five bodies; a low total, for the first day of the Games. I realised with a lurch that two of them had died at my hand, and that the bets on me would probably be pouring in back in the Capitol. I could almost imagine the viewers watching the screens now, as One and Four face off, begging for us to fight, here and now, whether we died or whether we just made good watching.

Something defiant flashed through me, and I sheathed my knife again, stepping forward with one hand outstretched. “Deal,” I said, loud and clear, hoping that they had a camera. Maybe this would make them go even wilder; alliances never lasted long, and in some cases only served to put people into closer proximity and force them to kill each other sooner. Practically doing the Gamemakers work for them. I was not prepared, therefore, for the smile that split Kidagakash’s lips, showing off that little nick in her tooth, before she clasped my hand in return. Dusty, bloody already, we stood there for a moment.

“Deal.”


	7. Chapter 7

I released the grip first, and looked around us, the desolation and supplies spread everywhere. Normally the Careers would try to control the Cornucopia and everything that could be found there, but I realised with another rush of giddiness that this time it was not the Careers who had control, but Kidagakash – and me. We held the Cornucopia, and had our pick of the spoils.

I was about to voice the realisation, though doubtless it had been her plan all along, when Kidagakash put her fingers to her lips and gave a looping, piercing whistle. It carried through the still air, then an answer came, not quite as clear but similar, and obviously human. Almost immediately afterwards, figures began appearing from behind the walls of the stadium, and all over again I was hit with realisation. This was a second pack, not of Careers but of those who would normally lose. Why had she gone to them?

The first to reappear were the tributes from Seven, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, carrying packs and with protective vests over their clothes. Then, clearly from further away, Milo and Cinderella from Twelve, carrying nothing at all. They must have trusted that they would be able to return for supplies later, or had been taking a risk that I certainly would not have done.

Esmeralda looked to be around my age, lean but not unfit, with bright green eyes that took me in without revealing her thoughts. Besides her, Quasimodo’s appearance was even more shocking, the vest hanging round him limply, his hunched back rising higher than his head and his thick arms hanging low, but I could see intelligence in his eyes, humanity. Cinderella would have been Pocahontas’s age, or perhaps a little older, but her frailty made her seem far more vulnerable. It did not help that Milo, her companion, all gangly limbs and awkwardness, had to help her up some of the steeper parts of the rubble.

“Cinderella, sweetheart,” said Kidagakash immediately, taking me by surprise with the tenderness in her voice, “I want you to gather packs for us. Find dried food, water, and especially medical equipment. Protective clothes would be good as well.” She ran her hand round the girl’s cheek, her expression practically maternal, then straightened up. “Esmeralda, go with her, keep watch. Milo, did you get a good look at the area?”

“Yes,” he replied. I looked back and forth between the two, feeling as if I had walked into a business meeting or something of the sort. “I wasn’t expecting the building, but it makes it easier. The foundations will be old, unstable. I think I can drop it.”

“Good.” Again, that smile, turning from the one that she had used for Cinderella to something far more dangerous. “Take Quasimodo... and Ping. They will help you. I will keep guard, and start moving what I can to burn.”

I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, but she was already bending down, ripping a sleeve off Eric’s shirt, and using it to secure her spear over her shoulder. Milo turned to me with a look of surprise, then cleared his throat and stepped towards me, almost going to shake my hand before changing his mind and raising both arms in a peaceful gesture.

“So, ah, I don’t think that we’ve been introduced. I’m Milo Thatch, from District Twelve.”

“I know,” I said flatly.

“Well, yes. And you’re Fa Ping, from One. I mean, you know that as well, obviously. Well, I didn’t know that you were going to be joining us, but I didn’t really know about anyone except Cinderella and myself. So-”

He seemed about to continue, but I wasn’t sure that I could bear it. I had just killed two people, who could only have been two years older than me at the most, and was still standing over one of their bodies. There was some plan being unfolded that I did not understand, and instead of running alone or with the Career pack that had expected my presence, I was surrounded by a group of some of the people who had got the lowest scores, who even the Gamemakers expected to die quickly.

I wondered, distantly, whether I was going mad.

I raised both of my hands. “Just tell me what we’re doing now.”

“Right, yes.” He went to push his no-longer-there glasses back up his nose, then brushed his hands together. “Well, there’s a lot more supplies here than we thought, but the plan is the same. To destroy them. The Careers... well, except Kida, of course, and you... don’t know as many survival skills, just fighting. So we’re going to take what we want, and destroy the rest.”

“By burning it?” I remembered what Kidagakash had said. “Look, a lot of this stuff won’t burn properly...”

“No,” said Milo quickly, and pointed back down to the metal plates, at the base of the slope, were we had stood. Twenty-three plates were intact, one replaced by a crater where Pocahontas had leapt out and wriggled free of the Gamemakers’ grasp. “By collapsing the floor, using the explosives. One of the tributes from District Three might have been able to do it instead, I mean, maybe better, but...”

The boy, Jim, had done what I would have called the sensible thing and escaped the bloodbath. The girl, Amelia, had fallen to my blade. But I had seen this done before, many years ago now -- before my father's time, in fact. The Careers had tried it again, nine or ten years ago, but it had ended badly. Very badly. That was the year that Belle from District Seven had won, due in part to all of the Careers wiping themselves out.

“Well, I still think that I can do it,” he continued. There was a confidence there still, and I realised that his words had been more about modesty than anything else. I could hardly think how he of all people had ended up in the Arena. How he could possibly survive. Yet here he was, with the first five gone and the bloodbath over for the moment. “I just need some help getting them moved. I spotted some shovels whilst Cinderella and I were on our way back.”

The Career pack normally had far simpler plans than this. Get food, flashlights, night-vision glasses, water, and weapons. Find the weaker tributes and kill them. Hold out as long as you dared in each other’s’ company, waiting for the alliance to break down.

I hoped that digging up the landmines wouldn’t be too much like digging graves, and that Milo Thatch from District Twelve knew what he was doing. But somehow, I still preferred this sort of plan.

  
  
  
  


The sky was starting to darken by the time that, under Milo’s supervision, we had dug up the plates and the mines beneath them and reburied them in a pattern which he said should shatter the foundations and bring them all down. It grated to see so many weapons and provisions go to waste, but I knew that they had been picked over already and the best – or perhaps the most useful would be a better term – would already have been taken. We each had a pack by then – Quasimodo’s heavily modified so that he could carry it over the shoulder which was less deformed – filled with a selection of the most useful items.

All of the wood, the fabric, and the food which Kidagakash did not want had been dragged together at the mouth of the Cornucopia. We now stood around it, and I could feel the nervousness in the air which said that the others did not have much more idea than I did about what happened now.

Kidagakash stood in front of us. She had removed her grey jacket now, replacing it with a black protective vest and blue fabric, stripped from some tent, tied around her waist like a sash. A flare rolled from hand to hand, then stopped, clasped between them both.

“This is where it really starts,” she said quietly. There was something that I didn’t understand in her words, and I knew that I wasn’t meant to.

She lit the flare, which burst into a thick spray of red sparks, and dropped it into the pile of supplies in front of us. The fire caught quickly, spread even faster, with odd colours licking at its edges from the things that were burning.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

The Careers had been moving for the whole day by then, but they probably hadn’t gone too far. They still had four people, and were probably still fairly sure that they could have taken out Kidagakash – I could _not_ call her Kida as the others did – and me if I for some strange reason aligned myself with her. They might not have realised that there were others with us, but other than Quasimodo I wouldn’t have rated them as much of a danger myself. I wouldn’t even have thought of Quasimodo as a danger, until I saw him shove aside a concrete block as large as he was and realised that the forty kilo kettlebell must have been the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps that was why he scored a nine from his private session.

The stadium was not that large, but walking out to the edge of it seemed suddenly momentous, as if this really was just the beginning. When we reached the outer edge, we stopped for a moment, and Quasimodo selected a chunk of rubble that was probably ten kilos or so in weight, lifting it as if it was nothing.

“Once it’s thrown, run,” said Milo. There was a shake in his voice. How powerful could the landmines be? They were only meant to kill one person when they went off.

Stone in hand, Quasimodo eyed the distance, stepped up, and then in one impossible throw launched it through the air, tumbling, falling, right into the pile of the other supplies that had been set up.

I realised a moment too late that I had not started running when the others did. No hand on my arm reminded me, no shout; they were, after all, waiting for my death as much as I was waiting for theirs.

As the stone fell, moving now towards the ground, my mind screamed and I turned, breaking into a sprint. My muscles ached from digging, from heaving around the mines and the supplies and the stones, from fighting. From killing. But now I ran, well behind all of the others but catching up fast, as the world unravelled behind me.

An eruption of noise surrounded me, a roar worse than anything I had ever heard. It made my eyes judder in their sockets. In its wake, the scream of shearing stone, crashing, rumbling, like an avalanche right at my heels.

Something smacked into my shoulder, knocking me to my knees, and I had to fight to pull myself upright again. My right arm felt curiously numb, only a faint warm tingle running through it, but I pushed it aside and gritted my teeth and ran, after the others and then with them, out into the old road that surrounded the stadium, across it, and then sliding down the steep slope on the other side that took our feet out from under us before we could even warn each other.

We hit the bottom as the sound of collapse started to wane behind us, feet splashing into a centimetre of something so filthy it barely deserved the word water to describe it. The smell of it mixed with the taste of dust in my mouth as I leant back against the concrete slope, most of the others doing the same. There was still the occasional crash or boom from behind us as another chunk of the stadium fell, but it had mostly settled.

“That was more powerful than I thought,” said Milo finally, breaking the silence. His voice was shaking slightly, but he was grinning. Esmeralda laughed, a bubble of sound which, no matter how fast she suppressed it, caught on the walls and echoed back at us. I gritted my teeth and wondered again whether it would be worth leaving these people behind, with how little they knew, before I learnt too much about them. Ping and I had always struggled with that part of being a Career: the fact that these would be people, with faces and names and personalities, not dummies or silhouettes to be killed.

“We should get moving,” I said, and even to me the tone sounded harsh. Kidagakash shot me a glare, lips pressed tightly together, but peeled herself off the wall and looked around. “This won’t be a safe place to stay. Even if the Careers don’t find us, the Gamemakers could set any number of traps down here.”

So could the Careers, but I didn’t think that as likely. Traps were not their style – too impersonal, not enough glory. What traps normally appeared in the Games came from other Districts.

“It is getting dark,” she said, and I supposed that passed for agreement. “We should try to find shelter, or at least somewhere that we can set watches.”

At her words, the others started to move, seeming to agree that this was the time to get going. I frowned at them, acting like subordinates, and wondered whether she had given them some fool promise, keeping them alive or protecting them or some nonsense. It would be a lie; only one person would be walking out of this Arena. But I supposed that it could be an alluring sort of lie, especially to someone for whom becoming a tribute was little more than a death sentence.

Without negotiation, we turned so that the stadium was on our left and started moving along the deep culvert. The water on the ground was stagnant, with floating leaves and unidentifiable piles of muck, broken here and there by rubble. It was a steady three metres deep, with a sharp slope on the side we had come from and a sheer drop on the other. Here and there, paint faded beyond legibility made shapes and swirls against the grey. Old graffiti, perhaps.

The sky continued to darken as we went on, but as night drew in thick clouds began to cover the sky, blotting out any sun or moon we might have hoped for. It was going to be pitch black soon, and any light of fire among the ruins was going to stand out sharply.

After about an hour, Kidagakash stopped, shaking her head. “This is all the same. Hang on.” She picked up a small stone from within the water and tossed it lightly over the sheer wall on our right. It was flung back, hard. “A forcefield. This must be the edge of the Arena.”

“That’s small,” I said. “Smaller than any Arena has been before.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” she replied, though there was no lightness to her tone. She had caught the stone on its return and was now tossing and catching it one-handed, eyes still fixed on the invisible wall beyond, cutting us off from the outside world. “They’re probably just trying to push us together.”

I looked towards the steep slope on our left, crossed to it and tried to scramble back up. The grey concrete should have given me some grip, especially with the boots that I was wearing, but as soon as I took both feet off the ground I found myself sliding back again. Muttering a curse, I tried again, but it slipped under my hands worse than the pole in the training had, and I stepped back with a frown.

Before I could reach for the rope in my pack, Quasimodo appeared beside me, only shoulder-high, and put one gentle hand on my arm. His touch surprised me.

“Let me help,” he said.

I was uncertain whether I wanted to accept help from him, to accept help from anyone even at this early stage of the Games. Even as I was hesitating, however, another cannon boomed in the distance, and I knew that the Careers were hunting. “All right,” I said, then forced myself to add: “Thank you.”

I stepped up to the slope again, felt his hands scoop under one of my feet, and then rose up the slope as easily as if I was in an elevator. It was so slick I barely thought to catch hold of the top and pull myself the rest of the way up, so that I was crouched on the top.

“We’re further from the stadium than when we started,” I reported down. “It isn’t at the centre.”

The others variously nodded and looked at me uncertainly. I looked around again, scanning for light as the sky became darker, then shook my head. All that I could see were jagged silhouettes of ruined buildings as they jutted into the sky, and the Arena had fallen silent as well.

“Tie off a rope,” suggested Esmeralda, “and we’ll head up. Find shelter up there.”

I could have left then. Turned, run, left them there. Of course, they would be able to get out quickly enough, with Quasimodo able to boost another person up, but it would buy me time to disappear into the ruins of the city.

I was seriously considering it when I saw a flicker of torchlight, not far away, and heard the undercurrent of voices. Without wasting breath, or giving us away with noise, I turned and slid back down the slope. “Careers,” I hissed, and I saw realisation dawning. Cinderella clutched Milo’s arm.

“Come on.” Kidagakash gestured along the way we had been heading. “There’s a broken section further down.”

A sense of fear had settled into the group, one that I didn’t much share but could understand. I loosened the staff from my back, carrying it in one hand as we continued another few metres before coming to the section that Kidagakash had been talking about. An area of the slope seemed to have crashed away, creating a hollow in the concrete that provided from shelter from the rest of the Arena. We still didn’t have enough protection to risk a fire, but the rubble provided a dry place to sit or crouch, and as the world darkened it felt a little less exposed.

The anthem began to play, announcing the start of the list of deaths for the day. I walked out to the edge of the hollow automatically, looking for the seal of the Capitol projected onto the clouds, and folded my arms across my chest as I waited. Cinderella crept up beside me, still holding back a little, but to my surprise the others did not appear.

The first headshot to appear was that of Amelia, her District number Three beneath her image. Then Eric, from Four; I knew he would be a surprise, considering the Careers almost always made up most of the last eight. Then Megara, from Five, Aladdin and Jasmine, from Eight, and Kocoum, from Nine. Then the seal again, and a repeat of the anthem. Light, for the first day, but I suspected that the collapse of the stadium would have given enough drama for the audience in the Capitol to be satisfied.

Then the sky faded to the deep grey again, and we were plunged into darkness.


	8. Chapter 8

I wasn’t fool enough to sleep in front of other people, despite the fact that I was the only person among them who had killed anyone so far. To the others, I said that I was going to keep watch, and Kidagakash said that she would take the first one beside me. There was only one pair of night-vision goggles among the whole pile of supplies – clearly, the Gamemakers had wanted to play with the darkness – and she was wearing them. I picked at some of the dried fruit and water we had collected, just enough to keep myself sharp, and waited for the night to wheel on.

In the middle of the night, yet another cannon went off, and I suppressed a shiver. With the number of deaths that had taken place, someone had probably outstripped me.

I seriously considered trying to make a deal with Kidagakash to kill the others and leave. Seven were already dead; if we got rid of the four with us, it would take us down to fewer than half of the tributes remaining. But she seemed to actually care for them, or at least had some sort of plan, and I did not want to make myself her enemy just yet. I held my tongue.

The thoughts were still swirling in my head when I realised that my boots, which had been in perhaps a couple of centimetres of water, now splashed slightly when they moved. I bent down, put my hand into the water, and realised that it was now at least ten centimetres deep – and moving.

“Ping...” I heard Kidagakash saying in the same moment. “The water.”

“I know,” I replied. “Let’s get the others. I think we need to get out of here.”

I could hear the water now, running, pushing small stones aside as it tumbled past. The deeper it got, the faster it flowed, and it was quickly deepening. We woke the others quickly, throwing sleeping bags and tarps back into their packs, but by the time we were moving the water was already half way up my calves and getting fast enough to tug at my feet.

“Like you did yesterday, Ping. Quickly.”

I could hear the urgency in Kidagakash’s voice. Coming from District Four, she was doubtless a better swimmer than I was, but in the dark and in an unknown area that might not be enough. Quasimodo was at my side in a moment, launching me up and over the surface, even as I heard a dangerous rumble somewhere in the distance. There was rope in my pack, and I looked around for somewhere to tie it to, cursing the empty street which I found myself in.

A lump of twisted metal which might have once been a fire hydrant seemed to be my own choice. I looped the rope around, threw on a double of the only knot I could remember clearly in the heart-pounding moment, and rushed back to throw it over.

“Go,” said Kidagakash, pushing Cinderella up first. The water was getting still deeper, now almost at her waist, and choppy. The rope was only visible because it was white, and I wished that we had thought to tie knots in it to help climbing as the young girl struggled up. Once she was within my arm’s reach, I grabbed her hands to pull her up, as Esmeralda started climbing as well. She was faster, needed less of my help, and with both of us pulling Milo was up faster than I would have expected.

The water was still rising, swallowing them up. Kidagakash pushed Quasimodo in front of her, and he surprised me as well with how fast he could climb. The rope, though, bowed under his weight, and I saw as if in slow motion my knots tugging, slipping, unravelling. Crying out, I lunged for the rope, and the others instinctively followed me, all of our hands latching around it and hauling as if we were playing a children’s tug of war.

I saw a hand creep over the edge of the slope, then slip away again, and only the weight on the rope stopped my heart from skipping a beat. “Quasimodo!” I called, but my voice was swallowed up by a roar of water that came from above us, crashing sound filling the whole Arena.

His hand reappeared, and I reached to grab it, latching hold of his wrist and heaving with all of the strength that I could muster. His other hand wrapped around the edge, and I saw his muscles shift and clench as he pulled himself up over the edge. He was soaked to the shoulders, face white in the darkness, shivering. I realised that it was getting even colder, without a wind picking up. Probably more work by the Gamemakers.

“Kida!” Milo was standing beside me, leaning over and still holding on to the rope. I could see Kida’s hair, a white shock below, and the faint movement of her limbs as she grabbed for the rope that was now being twisted and wrenched by the current lapping at her chest.

The sound was still crashing around us; I saw Kidagakash look along the culvert, turned, and followed her line of gaze. A black wall was advancing, tipped with white foam; water forcing noise ahead of it like a shockwave. Before I could even blink, it crashed down on us, throwing Kidagakash aside like a rag doll, the rope dragging from her hands.

Instinct took over. I grabbed hold of the rope myself and slid down, trusting in the strength of the others – the strength of Quasimodo, now holding the rope as well – and sliding so fast that I thought the skin might come off my hands. I could see the rope slipping through her hands, the water threatening to drag her away, but I looped the rope around my forearm and, as I hit the water, reached out for her with my other hand.

Her fingers locked around my wrist, other hand sliding off the rope. From this close, I could see her face, framed in wet white hair and with those luminous blue eyes. To my surprise, there was no fear there, even as the water tugged us out horizontal, sluicing over us, getting in eyes and hair and mouths, cold and stinking. Both of our hands tightened, until I felt as if I was losing circulation, but I gripped just as hard in return. The rope jerked in my grip, and I clutched tighter to it.

It dawned on me, as if from a distance, how easy it would be to let go of Kidagakash’s hand. It would be a terrible accident, I could tell the others. The Gamemakers would celebrate. The cameras that were doubtless trained on us would show my treachery, of course, but that could swing for me in terms of sponsors. The Capitol liked to watch the Districts fight, and liked it even more when we betrayed each other.

A sharp image in my mind: my father, proud of me for winning, disappointed in the tactics that I used to do it.

I pulled her closer to the rope, guiding her hands towards it. As the water continued to rush, we twined together around the rope, close enough for me to feel awkward about it. At first, I was not sure whether we were moving, but then my shoulder bumped against concrete and we were scraped up to the surface. Hands hooked under my shoulders, but the water in my eyes was still blurring my vision as I sat on the road surface, coughing up water and mud and trying not to retch.

Still no cannons, at least that I had heard. I spat out a final mouthful of mud, pushed my hair back out of my face, and staggered to my feet. The hope that my pack was waterproof flitted through my mind, too fast to catch on to.

Esmeralda handed me the rope, now coiled back up again. For a moment, I looked at it stupidly before remembering what it was and tucking it over my shoulders once again.

“We need to find shelter again,” said Kidagakash. It wouldn’t do for tributes to be seen thanking each other. “Somewhere protected.”

“Or we could take on the Careers,” I replied. “They may be stronger, but we have more people and better supplies. They’ll be wondering what was making the noise and will probably try to see what it was. And I know Maleficent. She can poison, and she can use knives, but major hand weapons? No chance.”

“We don’t know if they were anywhere near the water. We saw them earlier, but they’ve probably moved on by now.”

“Then let’s light a fire and draw them out.”

I couldn’t help the thought, the hopefulness that flickered through my mind. Removing the Career Pack would leave me with only one trained tribute in competition – and she was currently soaked to the skin and with a graze on her face, standing barely two paces away from me. Where the Careers were on the hunt, they might take out one or two people more before we got to them. The tactics that I had been taught for seemingly as long as I could remember, the tactics that were supposed to get me out of here alive.

Again, though, Kidagakash shook her head. “Too dangerous. We should wait until morning to take them on.”

I didn’t want to wait like an animal, seeing if the Careers would find us. I didn’t want to waste hours. I didn’t particularly want to stay awake to guard these people and gain nothing in return for it. I slipped the staff from my pack and set one end of it against the ground, letting it crunch. The other hand drew a flare from my pocket, concealing it within my hand whilst shaking the water off.

“I won’t fight you, Kidagakash, because I made a truce with you,” I said carefully. Doubtless the cameras were trained on us, waiting for something dramatic, something pivotal. Well, let them have one. “And out of respect, I will not fight those with you. But your Games are not mine.”

Sadly, she stole the moment from me, looking at me... not coldly, but calmly. Resignedly, perhaps. “Then go.”

With a snap of my wrist, I hit the trigger that would light the flare. It sprayed sparks to the ground before me, and I saw the others wincing or shielding their eyes from the light. Without looking directly at it, I turned and hurled the flare into the water, where it was carried away, fast, like a shooting star.

My heels bit into the ground as I ran, in case Kidagakash changed her mind or one of the others decided that they were going to remove me from contention anyway. Our alliance may have been short-lived, but it let me know who was together and what they were capable of. True, they might have some ideas about me in return, but I thought that it would be a fair trade.

Once out of sight, I slowed to a walk, picking through rubble and between the shattered remnants of walls. I had not paid too much attention to the Arena background before, but could see it more clearly now. None of the remaining walls were more than about four metres high, with steel rods breaking out, bent and jagged. The roads seemed to be tarmac or concrete in the few places that they were visible, but rubble was strewn across most of the roads and there were craters here and there.

It had to be the remains of a city that had been destroyed in the Dark Days. Perhaps part of District Thirteen, perhaps an area that was no longer part of any District but had once existed, and now did not. I would not have expected the Capitol to show so blatantly what had been done in those days, but perhaps it was a reminder of what they were capable of doing. Besides, it made for a very different Arena than in previous years – so far I had seen no plants, no animals, not even the buzz of flies or the skittering of rats.

It made the destruction of the supplies all the more marked, and doubtless all the more problematic for those who had not managed to get much – or anything – before having to flee the bloodbath. I also wasn’t sure whether there would be a source of water other than the flood in the culvert, which might not last long in any case, and made a mental note to reserve what I had left.

Thirst, hunger. The growing cold. They were going to make people desperate, and desperate people could get reckless. I wondered again how well-supplied the Careers could possibly be.

Seventeen tributes remaining. Sixteen more people about to die. I was determined not to be one of them.

The night had to be wearing on, but without the moon I could not gauge how long it would really be until dawn. This late in summer, the nights were not short, but I probably only had a few hours left.

The realisation gave me a second wind, brushing away some of the tiredness that had been starting to build in me. I set about trying to find some wood to make a fire, anything that would burn, but it became rapidly apparent that there was nothing here. The city had been abandoned so long that wood had rotted away, and the Gamemakers had not decided to replenish it.

I thought about the contents of my pack. A small medicine kit – Cinderella had been carrying the best things, I realised with a mental curse – food and water, too precious to burn, the staff likewise, throwing knives and a folding bow and arrows. I certainly did not want to give up any of my weapons. A tent and sleeping bag, which may or may not have been waterproofed, and a spare set of clothes. A coil of rope. Finally, and the only thing which seemed immediately useful, a firelighting kit including matches, a flint and steel, and chunks of flammable wax which would help to build a larger flame.

Clothes. Of course, the cold would be worse in my soaking wet clothes, which my anger had stopped me from noticing until that moment. I shrugged off my grey jacket and wrung it out as best I could, leaving a puddle of dirty water on the ground. The protective vest beneath was waterproof, however, and had protected my underwear well enough. Given a choice between dry and cold bare arms or wet and cold arms in a jacket, I went for dry and cold, and attached my jacket to the back of my pack.

The pants were another matter. Getting them off would mean removing my boots, and as long as I kept moving the water would not make them too cold. I decided to take the risk, leave them on, and turned my attention to the spares.

I recognised the fabrics that they were made from, and their purposes. A light wicked top meant to draw out sweat in strong heat, pants of the same fabric, and a thick, dense top of stiff fabric that would probably have been waterproof, and would doubtless offer some protection against lighter weapons. As I moved it, I realised that the colours also shifted slightly, in subtle camouflage.

The thicker top I pulled on over my vest, feeling it mould tight to my body but move with me, like a second skin. The heat-ready clothes I gathered into a bundle, judging that there would probably be enough of them to sustain a small fire if I used some of the firelighting wax as well.

I hunted around for a suitable nook and found two walls of a house that made a corner together, with just a little bit of an upper storey remaining. It was fairly open, but covered, and there was just enough rubble for me to build up a small pile and set a larger slab on top to support the fire. I ripped the clothes into strips, not out of any real logic but in the hope that it might make them burn more easily, and piled them up on top of the slab. Three out of the four wax blocks followed them, nestling in among the fabric, and though the matches were too soaked to light and broke in my fingers, I ended up tossing a pile of them on as well, figuring that the water would evaporate and they would burn easily enough.

I wasn’t that skilled with tinder and flint, and it took me more than a few attempts to finally get a smouldering ember on the edge of one of the strips of fabric. I cradled my hands around it, coaxed it along with my breath, and nudged a block of wax closer. As soon as it reached the wax, the ember became a flame, licking up, the wax seeming to melt away in an instant into the fabric around it. The fire followed, and soon I had a respectable light that probably would have been good enough to dry my jacket by.

Of course, I had no intention of actually sitting by the fire and waiting for the Careers to come and get me. The thought of my jacket did spark its own idea, however, and I used a length of metal to prop the jacket up so that, if you did not look too closely, it might look like a person huddling under the shelter and by the fire.

Unfolding my bow and locking it into form, I shouldered my pack and staff and retreated across the road, to another more ruined building which gave me shelter and, more importantly, camouflage in my dark greys and blacks. Despite the still-falling temperature of the air, I could feel a fire starting in my bones, and I hoped that the wait would not last long.


	9. Chapter 9

I might not have been with the Career pack, but I was meant to have been. I fought like them and, more importantly, I thought like them. Only, I hoped, a little bit ahead of the game. I saw flashlights in my peripheral vision, heard the rumble of voices, and fought to keep my breathing steady as footprints crunched into range. They were not quite coming from the direction that I had thought, and I shifted a bit further back into the rubble, turning my face towards it as a flashlight swept not three metres away from me.

“Look,” said one. I was fairly sure that I recognised the voice as belonging to Rourke. “A fire. There’s nothing to burn by accident out here, must be one of them.”

Murmurs of assent followed. I could hear a sword being unsheathed, and caught sight of a flicker of metal before they turned their flashlights off, fading back into the darkness again.

They moved closer, right in line between me and the fire, and I allowed myself a smile as I raised the bow. Then I hesitated, lowering it again – there were five figures in front of me. I had heard Rourke’s voice, and could recognise Helga’s slick movements, Maleficent’s slink and Shan Yu’s bulk, but there was another figure with them, long-haired, slight. Another of the girls? I knew that four were unaccounted for, but did not realise that they might join up with the Careers as well.

No matter. I knocked an arrow, raised the bow and took aim in the centre of Maleficent’s back, just below her neck. I was a good shot – very good, compared to some of what I had seen in Games and training before this. Helga’s silhouette, axe in hand, crossed the line of the fire again, and before I could lose my night vision altogether I loosed the arrow.

It slammed into Maleficent’s neck, and she gave a scream that cut off into choking as she fell to the ground. She twisted as she fell, but they would know the arrow came from behind, and I could see them turning as I put another arrow to the bow and released it, sending it flying into the female figure that I did not recognise. A cannon boomed as I fired a third shot, but it went wild, and as their flashlights started to turn back on I put the bow away with shaking hands and readied myself to hide or to run.

I was unlucky; a light skimmed right across me. Run it was, then. Eight down, sixteen left. One third of the way there. I broke from my position like a sprinter from blocks, knowing the route I was going to take, back the way I had come. I heard someone shout that they had seen me, a male voice that must have been Shan Yu, and an bolt clipped off a wall behind me, but my feet were sure and I felt like I was flying, floating, away from them with dramatic ease.

They did not pursue me far, and I heard the hovercraft come down to pick up Maleficent’s body. A second Career tribute down. As if in answer to that thought, as I slowed and crept into a half-collapsed pipe that gave adequate cover for exactly one person, I saw a silver parachute drop down out of the darkness, settling its package neatly outside my hiding place.

The first night was early in the Games to be receiving gifts from sponsors, no matter that it would be cheaper to give at this point. I had three tributes down to my name, however, two of them Careers, and it almost felt as if I was coming to dominate this Games.

Smiling, I pulled off the parachute and tugged it into my waistband, then popped open the grey plastic crate beneath. The smile faded as I recognised the item inside: a loaf of bread, shaped roughly like a fish and tinted green with seaweed. I was fairly sure that it was from District Four, the District surrounded by the sea and almost a part of it, the inhabitants one step from amphibious. But why would it be sent to me? I had killed one of their tributes and turned away from my short alliance with the other. With no answer springing to my mind, I stuffed the small loaf into my bag, pulled out a few bits of beef jerky, and chewed on them for a while until I became so tired that I had to seriously consider sleep.

While I slept, I would be vulnerable. But without sleep, I would deteriorate until I was hardly any better. Eventually, exhaustion made the decision for me, and I fell into an uncomfortable, restless sleep.

  
  
  
  


I awoke cramped and stiff, still curled up in the pipe. At some point during the night, water had started to trickle through, and my rear end was soaked again. I pulled a face, looked around cautiously from the mouth of the tunnel, and then crept out to stretch my limbs. Although I had iodine to purify any more water which I came across, I was down to my last litre, and it took half of that to stop my mouth from feeling unbearably dry. I followed it with a couple of dense flatbreads that had been in the original supplies and which filled me up fast, but I knew that I only had another two days, perhaps less, of food.

With low food supplies, and no chance that I had yet seen to get more, there would probably be a Feast before too much more time passed. Perhaps when we reached eight tributes, to lure in the last of us with the promise of food and a chance to take out the remaining competition. If that was the case, though, there would be eight more deaths before we reached that point.

As if in response to my thoughts, a cannon sounded, and I looked up instinctively even though I would not find out until the evening who it was. Before I had even looked down, a second sounded, and my eyebrows rose. Two deaths almost one after the other; perhaps the Careers had stumbled on a pair who had teamed up, perhaps two tributes had killed each other, or perhaps they were unrelated. If I made it out of here, I would find out, but for now it remained a mystery.

I would need more water, however, before the end of the day. I did not know whether the culvert was still full, or whether the water from it would be clean enough to drink even with iodine. It was a risk that I would have to take, however, and I picked a direction and started walking, staying close to walls wherever I could in order to keep cover. I saw hovercraft drop down somewhere to my right, two together, and disappear off again like distant birds. The killer or killers must have lingered there for a while.

The culvert came into sight in under an hour; the Arena itself must have been only about three hours across. That was far smaller than anything that I had seen before. Almost claustrophobic. There was a road running around the inside of it, and I waited on the other side for a while, crouched down in the shadow of a wall and pondering, toying with a throwing knife almost just to give my hands something to do.

It was worth waiting. After about twenty minutes, and barely a hundred metres away from me, I saw a figure dart out from between the walls and run down to the edge of the culvert. It was still full of water, but the surface had stilled now, murky and with almost oily patterns on the surface. She had very long blonde hair, which ran in a thick braid down to the small of her back, and though there was a short sword tied to her waist with rope she did not seem to have a proper pack with her. Kneeling at the edge of the water, she looked around, then scooped up water with both hands and drank straight from it.

I winced. She was asking for sickness, or worse, by drinking water like that. The realisation that she was one of my competitors came slowly, dawning in the back of my mind and creeping forward, and I looked down at the knife in my hand. At this distance, I could not hit her, but might I be able to creep up? She was kneeling at the edge, still scooping up handfuls of water as if she had not drunk any since the beginning of the Games.

Though I put my knife away, it was only to draw and ready my bow, clipping it out and knocking another arrow. It was my fourth of fifteen, and left eleven in the quiver tucked between my pack and my shoulderblades. Away from the bloodbath, and without the deliberate setting of a trap, I did not feel the buzz, the thrill, that allowed me to replace her with a silhouette, easier to shoot. I faltered, letting the string go slack again, then forced a deep breath into my lungs as I drew the fletching back to the corner of my mouth.

One more tribute down meant one step closer to getting out of here, to getting home. One more tribute down meant one more piece of _life_.

I took aim, and released the arrow.

Before it could make its mark, a spear buried itself in her shoulder, sending her lurching forwards with its weight and then falling backwards onto her side, propped up by the metal sticking out of her. I could see her twitching still, and no cannon had gone off, but I hung back still as I saw another figure appear from behind her. I recognised him as the boy from Five, Hercules, who had been an enthusiastic figure in his interviews, determined to impress himself upon the Capitol. He darted in, wrenching his spear from the girl’s body and cutting her shortsword away with a knife, then turned and ran again before I could even get a sight on him to shoot.

“Damn it,” I muttered, sitting back on my heels and waiting for the cannon. It did not come, however, and the girl moaned and spat blood on the ground, curled into the foetal position with her arms clutched to her bleeding shoulder. Hercules did not return, and it seemed that he had retreated and left her to die. No scream escaped her, just little choked sobs, and eventually I could not help it any longer.

Rising, I moved cautiously along the edge of the buildings, listening carefully for any movement, keeping low to avoid any projectiles. I hadn’t seen which alley Hercules had gone down, and checked each one as I passed to make sure that there was not someone lurking there. When I was fairly sure that they were clear, I turned back to the girl and made my way over to her.

It took me a while to remember her name, but it finally came to me as I knelt down beside her: Rapunzel. She was ashen-pale, her blonde hair soaked with blood, and I distantly remembered seeing her in District Eleven, with flowers woven into her hair, blinking in fear and amazement as she was reaped.

As I knelt down, she clutched at my hands, her fingers slippery with blood. Her eyes were very wide, and very green, like light through foliage, but seemed to struggle to focus on me.

“How-” she convulsed, and blood stained her lips. “How...”

I knew what she was asking; there was only one thing that she could possibly _be_ asking. How bad was her injury? I looked at the wound, but barely needed to. The blow from the spear had gone right through her shoulder and protruded through the front, and would only have done more damage when Hercules wrenched it out through the back again. Her muscles, her blood vessels, would have been torn to shreds.

“It can’t be healed,” I said quietly. There was no point in lying, not this close to the end with her bloody hands in mine, and the best that I could do was give her honesty. She nodded, twitched, but somehow still drew another breath. The spreading pool of blood trickled across and started to drip into the water, seeping out as a red stain.

Had I been wrong? Perhaps, in the hands of a skilled healer, this wound could have been stitched together and cleaned and she might have survived. If she lived after these minutes, the spear must have missed any arteries.

“Then end it,” said Rapunzel. Her hands were growing slack, and she grimaced. I thought that there might be tears in her eyes, but it was difficult to quite be sure. “ _Please_.”

It was almost a whimper, but she was still breathing, still bleeding in my arms. I nodded, and she gave a sigh that sounded so relieved it struck me harder than any defiance might have done. Slipping my hands out of hers, I drew my knife, tilted her head back gently, and cut through her neck in one deep swoop. Veins, arteries, trachea all together, and her blood rushed out in a river. Within seconds, she was still.

I let her drop, at first, curled up in the foetal position and small, then I reached in through the blood to straighten her out on her back. There was nothing more that I could do for her, but my hands were shaking as I rinsed them in the water of the culvert, upstream of her body, and filled my water bottles again.

Methodical, calming movements. I retreated into the ruined buildings and watched the hovercraft come down to scoop her up and take her away. The people that I had killed had not suffered so, I was sure... no, I hoped as such. Had they looked as defenceless in death? I had not paid attention to Amelia or to Eric; Quasimodo had picked up the bodies of the bloodbath tributes and laid them aside, so the hovercrafts could claim the bodies rather than having them drop down into nowhere.

I reminded myself that if they were not the ones disappearing into the hovercraft, then I would be. Sent home with a hole through my chest, an arrow in my gut, my throat slit, whatever had seen me dead at the hands of another tribute. If I didn’t want to die, then I was going to have to kill.

The only rule of the Hunger Games.


	10. Chapter 10

I returned to the tunnel where I had spent the night, purified my water, and drank until I didn’t have that nagging need to swallow against dryness. A slab placed in the tunnel provided me with a marginally sheltered place to sit, and the lay of the land was such that I could see a reasonable distance, including two or three roads and a handful of destroyed houses.

Eleven dead. That meant that we were half way there, but it was barely creeping into the afternoon of the second day. The Games rarely went this quickly; there was no fun in it, I supposed, having the violence and death be over so fast. Although the Bloodbath could sometimes take even more than half of the tributes, the fact that the deaths had continued over the rest of the day and into the second was more food for thought.

Of course, there was Kidagakash and her pack as well. I could hardly even call them a pack – a deformed boy, a thirteen year old girl, a boy who seemed intelligent but no fighter and... well, I supposed that Esmeralda at least had some potential, though I had not watched her too closely during our training days.

I crossed my legs and tucked my pack between them to examine the contents all over again. The fact that the water remained in the culvert was a good sign, as long as I made sure to thoroughly purify it before drinking. As for food, I had jerky, dried fruit, dense flatbreads and energy bars, as well as caffeine tablets in case I needed an extra boost. And, of course, the roll from Four that I did not understand. I was down to the clothes that I had, having burnt the lightweight ones and left my jacket by the fire whilst making my escape. I could always sneak back and see if I could retrieve it, but I preferred my current one anyway. My knives, eleven arrows, and the staff now sitting beside me made up my armoury. I didn’t understand half of the contents of my medical kit – creams, gels and shaped pads, alongside the more normal plasters and bandages. So far, mercifully, I had not had any need for them.

Tired, I allowed myself to rest for the afternoon, sneaking a little further down into the pipe and out of sight, and drifting in and out of sleep with one ear still open. The hours passed easily, and though I shuffled occasionally to find a more comfortable position, I concentrated more on getting some rest and allowing the rest of the tributes to handle themselves for a while. Let the cameras drift away from me.

I wasn’t sure whether or not to be surprised when no more cannons went off.

As evening fell and the anthem sounded, I crawled out of the tunnel again and stretched my legs and shoulders. Maleficent’s face was the first to appear in the sky tonight, followed by the boy from Three – Jim – the two from Ten – Woody and Jessie – and the girl from Eleven, Rapunzel, who I had ended up finishing off. Then the Capitol seal came up again, and the anthem played a second time.

I considered returning to sleep, but felt too restless. With no sounds for most of the afternoon – and no sign of anyone, even from my spot – I was still curious about what the Careers might be doing, and where Kidagakash and her group could have gone.

Once again, I made my way to the edge of the houses that edged the culvert, letting my night vision get good enough to pick out the rocks that marked my path, slight variations in the ground. This time, the sky was cloudless, strewn with stars and with a half-moon to provide some light. The world glowed silver and grey around me. Unlike what I had imagined, and unlike what the televisions showed every year, the Arena was quiet. Quiet enough to hear the crunching gravel beneath my feet, the distant sound of water in the culvert.

It was eerie, but more than anything else I noticed what I could not hear. There was no wind cutting between buildings, no sound of animals, not even the sound of other tributes moving around. Picking my way carefully, I could be quiet for most of the time, only occasionally giving enough sound to a footstep that it might have given me away.

Slowly, the night wore on. I followed the line of the houses along the culvert, stopping for a while to examine an area of disturbed water which might be due to a tunnel cutting across the culvert, or a large pile of rubble underneath the surface. It did not keep me for long, however, and I kept going again. There was a remarkable monotony to the path, looping around at a constant, gentle angle, and before too long I could see the looming silhouette of the stadium.

It was starting to get light again as I stopped, leaning on a wall and looking at the stadium pensively. I had probably been right in my earlier calculations; if the Arena was roughly circular, then it was about three hours across, nine or ten in circumference. Most Arenas were considerably larger, would take days to move around – or to be found in. Perhaps it was meant to force us together and make it difficult for us to avoid each other. The smaller the groups that formed, the more likely it became that you would walk into an enemy.

The Careers, Kida's group, myself, and up to four other people. I wasn’t yet sure what to make of those odds.

The explosion had been tremendous, but we had not waited to see what the result had been. As the sun rose over the Arena, turning the pretty silver of the night to dusty bone-grey, I made my way up towards the stadium. It wasn’t a steep hill, but I did feel increasingly exposed as I climbed it, and paused frequently to glance over my shoulder for movement or the flash of non-rusted metal.

The stadium had once been an oval, probably used for various sporting events. Both long sides had collapsed – or perhaps been collapsed – in the middle, but the curved ends had some damage on them as well, making the shape ragged. Old doorways stood open at the base as black rectangles, some with rubble or twisted metal partially blocking them, some yawning clear.

I prepped myself with my knife and flashlight and walked up to one of the doorways, staying to the side. They would make a perfect hiding place, if anyone had returned to them after the explosion had settled. Crouching down, I turned sharply, scanning with the light, but no figures appeared in the corridor.

Good. With measured steps, I walked down it, checking corners and scanning the walls for anywhere that might have been broken. I double-checked each step, making sure that there was nothing uneven about the stones, no wires or ropes spread across to form a trap, and the ceiling as well. There were a hundred ways to lay a trap, and those were only the ones that I knew of.

At the end, the corridor split into two, each half turning round into steps to lead up to the seating. I chose left, and went up, treating the steps the same way that I had treated the corridor until I started to see daylight above me, the stadium opening out.

I clicked the flashlight off, crouching down to gain some cover from the concrete around me. The early morning sunlight was bright, but not glaring, and let me check that block after block of seating was clear as I moved slowly upwards into the stands.

No sign of anybody. I found one of the plastic chairs that seemed to have survived relatively intact, opened and closed it a couple of times to check that it wasn’t too brittle, and sat down. It creaked, but held.

I wondered what the name of this city had been. There must have been a city, once upon a time, although I had yet to see anything beyond the culvert. How many people had lived here, what sport or sports this stadium had been for. Most of the games that had existed before the Dark Days had been forgotten by now, relegated to sections in obscure history books or stories for children that talked about the strange ways our people used to have. A few of them had survived, notably ‘boxing’, which had been built into our fighting training, and more basic ones like running and swimming.

But _team_ sports, they were long gone, the stuff of our grandparents' stories. Football, soccer, hockey, basketball. Doubtless the Capitol didn’t want us to know how to make teams. We barely knew how to make alliances in the Arena, although that was probably rather different seeing as soccer games had never ended with most of the players dead.

About the same number of people, though. Maybe the Gamemakers would have found the comparison amusing.

I sipped water and watched the sun rise, slowly spilling light into the centre of the stadium. Between the damage done by the explosives and my raised position, it was almost unrecognisable as the place where we had started. The Cornucopia had fallen, twisted and buckled by the blasts, now a crooked golden shape across the ground. A dusty oval of dry ground, which might have once been grass, seemed to form the centre of the stadium. The outer edges of it were undisturbed, but the centre had fallen away, forming a crater of jagged rocks and metal that had to be ten metres across and had doubtless swallowed up the supplies that Kidagakash had not deemed necessary or desirable. One end had blackened, charred remains which suggested the fire that had burnt there.

I put my feet on the back of the seat in front of me – there was, after all, no-one to complain – and sipped water as I contemplated a possible plan for the last few days.

From what I had seen, there were four people in the Career pack. They were armed, and had clearly survived this long, but they could not have had much in the way of supplies. If the five people who I suspected they had killed had been carrying food and water, that might have provided them with some, but they would surely run out before too long. Most of the tributes had grabbed a bag or two and run, and there would not be much food among that. For food, I gave them forty-eight hours’ worth at the most. If they had iodine, they would be fine for water.

Kidagakash’s pack was a different story. They were armed, and had three or four days’ food each, as well as medical supplies far better than mine. Between her training and the intelligence which I had seen one of her companions, Milo, display, I had no doubt that they would not be easily trapped. They could easily roam the Arena, staying out of the way of the others and staying alive.

Three others. I remembered seeing Hercules the previous day, but could not remember who the other two were. He had definitely been working alone, and armed, but I did not know anything else about them. They were wildcards, non-Careers, and might have been following their own tactics or no tactics at all.

And me. I hoped I could keep things flexible enough to not have my moves predicted by the others, but I wasn’t too sure. How much like a Career was I acting?

I took out the loaf of bread from District Four again, turning it over in my hands. I’d eaten it before, some years ago. My father had a liking for it, the way that the salt and seaweed made it taste, but I hadn’t much liked it at the time. Figuring that a few years made a big difference to the taste buds, I started to tear pieces off and eat it, impressed that it wasn’t already starting to go stale. It definitely tasted better than I remembered.

I popped a caffeine tablet mid-morning to keep myself awake, drank another litre of so of water, and around midday trotted down the stadium steps to get a closer look at the damage to the centre of the stadium.

From a distance, it had looked bad. Up close, it was almost terrifying. Chunks of rock, from powder up to boulders larger than I was, lay in heaps that trailed down into a slithering slope into the crater. It was at least fifteen feet deep, and felt distinctly unstable beneath my feet as I ventured a short way down. Thinking better of it, I retreated again, and frowned down into the mess. There were twisted lumps of metal that might have originally been weapons, jagged shards of wood and melted pieces of plastic. I couldn’t see anything that might be of use after it had been so thoroughly destroyed. Before I set off a stray mine or got myself killed in some equally stupid way, I backtracked out of the playing field and into the seats, this time settling into one of the players’ boxes and scraping a corner clean before lying my jacket on it and sitting down.

I considered it likely that, one way or another, some of the tributes would come back here in search of supplies. There were seven people who did not know how bad the explosions had been and, if they had not been back already, they probably would be before too long.


	11. Chapter 11

The sky began to darken only a few hours later. I frowned; this was far too early for night to be setting in. Leaning out from my shelter, I saw dark clouds gathering in the sky and heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. Rain. Despite myself, I frowned at the sight, irritated that water supplies would be going to those who hadn’t otherwise managed to get them. I supposed that it was boring for the Capitol to watch people starve to death, rather than actually fighting.

A few years before, they had tried maintaining permanent channels on each of the tributes as well as the Capitol-decided primary one, allowing people to follow whatever tribute they most liked the look of. The behaviour of some of the tributes, however, had been unacceptable to the Gamemakers, and some of the screens had gone black from time to time. As far as I knew, they weren’t doing the same this year. Part of me wished that I did, just so that my family wouldn’t be having to watch other tributes and wonder what I was doing.

Before long, the sky was so dark that it might as well have been night, though the thunder remained a distant threat and no rain was forthcoming. I settled down comfortably, ate another of the flatbreads and some jerky for protein, and continued to watch time tick away.

My thoughts were fragmented, not clear enough to get anything together. They jumped from past to present to future and back again: my family, the state I was currently in, the great gamble I had made in coming here. Really, there was no way that I could succeed. I felt a painful heat behind my eyes, and cursed myself for even thinking of crying.

The anthem sounded, and I looked up automatically, like a dog searching for food. The seal was traced clearly on the dark clouds, looking if anything brighter than usual against them. Afterwards, though, no faces followed. For the first day since the start of the Games, there had been no deaths.

It wasn’t that unusual. After a busy few days, the deaths tended to settle down as the tributes turned to survival rather than killing. Defence and offence; I could remember our trainers back in District One talking about them as if they were two completely different sets of tactics. Even at the time, I hadn’t been so sure that they really were. After all, didn’t you win by staying alive?

For possibly the first time since the Games had begun, I started to wish for an alliance. Or, at least, an ally. Someone to talk to, rather than sitting in this oppressive silence waiting for something to happen. In training, of course, we were told to not trust anyone, that any alliances that we made would only be temporary. But on the screens, I had always seen the Gamemakers show conversations between allied tributes, especially non-Careers. Touching scenes. Character moments. Apparently the Capitol wanted to get to know people before they died.

Tiny cameras all over the Arena would be recording us all, the thirteen people that were left. Were some of them talking to each other? Or were they sitting in similarly oppressive silence? Even with the caffeine fading from my veins, I struggled to get any sleep as the night wore on.

  
  
  
  


When I awoke, it was still dark, but the growing heat still made me think that it was supposed to be daytime. The air seemed to have grown thicker, hot and humid in a way that made me feel as if I was sweating before I had even moved. My clothes stuck to my skin, and I realised that I had not cleaned them in the entire time that I had been here. I could not risk stripping to bathe, though, even if I felt safe enough to do so.

My dried fruit would probably not last much longer, so I ate most of what was left and followed it with another flatbread. I had two left, a handful of strips of beef jerky, and my energy bars. Food for perhaps two days, if I rationed it properly.

I ventured out of the back of the stadium and made my way down to the water in the culvert. It seemed to have gone down since the previous day, to judge by the dark line around the edge, but not by more than ten or twelve centimetres. For extra safety, I filtered the water through a layer of gauze from my medical kit into the bottle before adding the iodine. It took off a layer of mud and bits of leaves, and I made a mental note to do it again even if I had been lucky enough, so far, to not fall ill.

I had spent time learning how to hunt, but that was no option in an Arena that did not even seem to have rats or insects. At least the others would be in the same state. I doubted that anything could live in the water in the culvert, short of mutts from the Capitol. I was six years old in the year that Grimhilde, one of the tributes from Two, started to cannibalise the bodies of her opponents after she killed them; I remembered hiding behind my father’s arm as she did so, larger-than-life on the television screen. As far as I knew, it had never happened before, and it had certainly not happened since.

Thinking too much about food made me hungry, and I tried to tear my thoughts elsewhere. All over again, I thought wistfully of having an ally, just for someone to talk to.

Of course, I didn’t have to sit in silence. I cocked my head to one side thoughtfully as I wandered back to the stadium, then took a seat and settled my bag beside me, setting my elbows on my knees. There might not be other people around, but there were certainly cameras.

“So, the 74th Hunger Games,” I said to mid-air. It felt strange, and perhaps the Gamemakers would be wondering whether I was going mad. Part of me did myself. I tried to think of it as an interview, but one in which I was making up the questions as I went along. “It’s certainly an honour to be involved.”

That had been the word, all the way through. _Honour_. My father had acted _honourably_ , and now it was an _honour_ for me to take part. If I won, I would bring still more _honour_ on my family. The irony of the word twisted on my lips after I said it, and I found myself smiling, but probably not for the reason that the Gamemakers would be thinking.

“So far, it’s been a whirlwind,” I said quietly. “I grew up in the Victor’s Village, among the children of other victors. Even last year, one of us volunteered at the reaping.” For a moment, my throat tightened warningly. My dear friend Khan, son of the female victor of the 54th Hunger Games, had never come home. “We all know what the Games are. How terrible and glorious they can be. But it’s still strange to be here, in this Arena with so few other people and yet all of you.”

The Capitol. Laid out before me, although I couldn’t see it. Of course, it was possible that their attention was elsewhere, that some other tribute was being more interesting than I was. But it was dark and quiet, and I might still have been the one that they had the attention on.

“Many of you know that my father, Fa Zhou, won the Quarter Quell. The 50th Hunger Games. And now, twenty-four years later, here I am. His son, in the 74th Games. There are thirteen of us remaining, but let me say this: I want to win.”

I had to draw a deep breath on admitting it.

“Someone once said to me that some tributes go into the Arena to survive, and some go in to win. And I want to win. I want to go home to my family in honour, to do what has not been done in a generation and be a victor, child of a victor.

“I always knew that I might be in the Games.” My voice softened. “I always knew that I might have this... opportunity. I did not expect it to be this early, though. I had thought that I might volunteer when I reached eighteen, for the honour and for the sake of the younger tribute who might be called.

“I... my family means everything to me.” For this first time, my voice cracked, and I allowed it to. Possibly for the first time since these Games had started, I was telling the truth. “I can’t imagine being without them, or hurting them... or disappointing them. I couldn’t bear to disappoint them.”

My voice almost faded away, and I felt tears in my eyes but forced them back. For one moment, I looked down to my hands, then back up again to where I imagined the cameras would be.

“Baba, this is for you. I’ll be coming back soon.”

I sat for a moment longer, looking into the distance, then gathered myself and got to my feet. I was shaking, far more so than I had during my interview with Snow White. That had felt like a game, as if I was an actor in a play, and this had not. With my invisible audience and my Games-dirty state, I still hoped that they would show the message. And that my father would see it.

I milled back and forth around the stadium, walking all the way around the central court, going up and down the stairs and checking how many were still intact and passable. Once or twice, I thought that I heard creaking in the metal roof, far above, but when I looked up there was nothing. Metal settling, perhaps, or just part of my imagination. I ate two energy bars, but even so I was starting to feel weaker by the late afternoon, tiring.

Night fell again, still barely darker than day, and for the second day there were no faces in the sky. The previous day it had not seemed so strange, but this time I frowned, even as I took my staff from my pack and swung it, experimentally, just checking that my muscles still remembered the fluid movements. A short practice, and then I selected a new place to sleep, higher up in the stands and hidden among the seats. Waiting for the waiting to finish.

  
  
  
  


When I next awoke, it was still dark. Once again, I decided it had to be morning by the mere fact that I was awake, and got up stiffly to survey the gloomy sight of day four. I drank over a litre of water, and ate the last flatbreads, but I was still feeling woozy as well as agitated. Two days with no fighting, but also with minimal food, was starting to wear on me.

I wandered down to the crater again, this time poking around to see if anything had survived the blast. A couple of knives still looked usable, so I removed them, and a metal cooking pot, although buckled, was at least recognisable. It must have held a good three or four litres, so I took it down to the river, filtered water into it, and headed back into the shelter of the stadium.

Even washing my face felt like a luxury. I could see the water becoming grimier as I did so, but it still seemed usable, and I tried to keep as much as I could in the bowl. My face felt shiny and the air surprisingly cool against it as I wiped away the water again. I did not bother washing my hair, but tried to comb it out with my fingers before putting it back into its usual tight bun.

My hands went next. I used my knife to trim my nails short again – despite my mother’s coaxing, I had always kept them as short as Ping ever had – and carefully scrubbed off as much of the dirt as I could. Shrugging off my jacket, I continued up my arms to above my elbows, letting the water evaporate off my skin and raise goosebumps in its wake. After some consideration, I also removed my shoes and socks, sighing at how good it felt to have air on my feet. Although I’d loosened my boots at night, I had not fully removed them in case I needed to fight, or to run, at short notice.

It was so strange, how just four days could make such a difference. Of course, there were some for who the difference had been final, but I thought again about my father’s words. _‘The Hunger Games has no survivors. Just a victor.’_ Even if I made it home, I would not be the person that I had been when I left. It wasn’t just appreciating mostly-clean water and knowing what it was like to feel hungry. It was the people that I had killed, and doubtless the horrors that the Gamemakers would have in store for us once the lack of deaths began to get too boring.

For good measure, I washed my socks and laid them out to dry, dangling my feet over the seat as well. It was cool, and still humid, but it still felt good to have the air on my feet.

Occasionally, thunder rumbled, but it sounded distant enough to be outside the Arena. I was fairly sure, as well, that it would not be enough to drown out any cannon fire. By the time that evening came, I had eaten almost all of the food that I had, drunk four litres of water in an attempt to fool my body into thinking that it was full, and was starting to contemplate whether there was any way to make concrete edible. For the second day in a row, the Capitol seal in the sky was unaccompanied by any faces, and the feeling sunk into me that, tomorrow, the Gamemakers were bound to do something to make the Games more ‘exciting’. By which, of course, they would mean more dangerous, more deadly. More exciting to film.

If they wanted to try and kill me tomorrow, I was going to need to be well-rested for it. I picked yet another different place within the stadium to sleep, and for a moment as I drifted off I could almost have imagined a great shadow of a bird flitting about the roof above me.


	12. Chapter 12

I awoke sore, hungry and irritable. A breakfast of my last energy bar did not even take the edge off, and I sat with my foot tapping and thoughts swirling in my head as to where I could find more food. Had I seen any plants, walking around the city? Any semblance of green? Outside of my dreams, had there been any movement that could look like an animal? Surely there could not be anything living in the culvert.

I drank water and tried to pretend that it was food. I had always known, of course, that food was a major issue in the Arena, but there had not been an Arena so completely bereft of food sources since the last Quarter Quell, and my father’s success.

Not even food from sponsors. Could it have been banned, or simply made so expensive that nobody could afford to send food? My family had been receiving a victor’s money for many years now, and if anybody would be able to afford food, they would. Either there was something that I was missing, or the Gamemakers had made a deliberate choice.

And yet, the bread, on day two. Just after I had left Kidagakash. Where could that possibly fit in?

Sitting in the stadium had bought me no competing tributes, and no chance of food. Time to move on. I sorted and shouldered my pack, opting for my bow and arrows over my staff, and prepared to leave the stadium through the side nearest to the city. Just as I was about to do so, a silver parachute fluttered down from above me, and I frowned at it right up until it reached my feet.

“Nice timing,” I muttered, and my stomach gave a growl. I opened the parcel, hoping desperately for some sort of food.

Naturally, it was not. The package contained a net, a good eight feet square and tough. Either Shang and Chi Fu were advocating trapping the other tributes and eating them, or they wanted me to know that at least _something_ was capable of living in the filthy water of the culvert.

“All right, you win,” I said to no-one in particular. I had never been much of a fan of seafood.

I crossed the stadium back to the culvert, glancing around cautiously. There had been a bridge, about two hours clockwise of here, but I didn’t fancy going anywhere so exposed. If any of the others had worked out that they were supposed to fish as well, they would also probably go there.

I pulled out the half-melted knives I had retrieved from the explosion and used them to weight one end of the net, before kneeling on the edge of the culvert and tossing it out into the water. The ropes that led to the four corners twined together into one and tugged in my hands as the current tried to pull it away, but I held on determinedly.

At least sitting and waiting did not take too much energy. I felt light-headed, empty no matter how much water I drank, and drowsy despite the fact that I had slept well. I could feel my eyelids growing heavy, my head nodding, and jerked myself awake with little growls every time that I realised I was falling asleep.

The air grew warmer, muggier. Tiredness swelled stronger and stronger within me, and I sighed as my head tilted sideways towards my shoulder. It would be so easy just to rest for a while...

The rope tugged in my hands, and my head snapped upwards immediately. My hands tightened on the rope, twisting so that it could not slip from my grip, and I tensed against the pull. It was strong, tugging me towards the water even as I got one foot beneath me and heaved back against it, and I found myself breathing hard as I struggled to my feet and took a step back from the edge.

In my hands, the net bucked, and the water was churned white with whatever was thrashing inside. But I could feel my heart pounding, my body reacting eagerly to the fight, as I hauled again and again on the net. Slowly, one small step at a time, I crept away from the edge of the culvert, with more and more of the net coming free of the water and, just occasionally, a dark shape breaking the surface into visibility.

Whatever was throwing itself around had to weigh at least ten or twelve kilos, and it was with a wrench and a furious muted scream that I wrenched it up on to the road. At first I could make out nothing more than a dark blur, a furiously moving shape, but my eye managed to catch sight of feet, a tail, to recognise the darkness as fur. No matter; it was an animal, and it had to be there to be food.

I drew my knife, moving fast before it could disentangle itself from the net, and pounced onto the creature. My aim was to pin it beneath me – it was over half a metre long, but sleek and almost snake-like – but it was slippery and fast, and sank its teeth into my hand as I tried to grab its neck. Its bite felt like a handful of needles, almost too fine to feel and then burning as my skin realised what had happened, but whilst it was clinging to my hand its head was still, and I grabbed the knife with my left hand before slamming it through the creature’s skull.

It sank in up to the hilt, and with a final jerk the creature fell still, jaw still locked around my hand. I tried to pull its mouth open, but it would not move, and I had to stick the knife between its jaws and use it like a lever to pull the teeth apart. Even then, when I whipped my hand away, they slammed shut again.

Elation mingled with pain as I got to my feet, cradling my throbbing and bleeding hand to my chest. Once it was still, I could see that the creature had to be some kind of mutt from the Capitol; it looked a little like otters that I had seen in books or on the television, but more powerfully muscled, with a cord-like tail and sharp claws on the end of its lengthened limbs. Its head was different, shaped more like a dog or a wolf, with larger ears and a muzzle full of too many needle-like teeth to count.

And if it wasn’t edible, I was going to be pissed off.

Its claws had done some damage to my net, but nothing that I couldn’t patch, and for now I used the net to drag the creature back into the shelter of one of the stadium entrances. Still facing the culvert, the force field and, beyond, the grey wasteland that stretched out to a flat horizon, I settled down and started to skin my catch.

I didn’t have anything left to burn; the firelighting waxes were not real fuel and there was no wood. For a moment, I considered burning the net, but that would leave me unable to find food again, and nobody ever knew how long the Games were going to last. Starve to death, or risk poisoning myself on raw flesh? I considered the decision as I sawed the creature’s head off and started to gut it. With teeth like that, it would be a carnivore, making most of its innards inedible.

My hunger had been dulling, almost unnoticeable really, although I supposed that was a bad sign in itself. Now, though, with raw meat on my hands and the carcass nestled neatly on top of its pelt to protect it from the dirty ground, my stomach twisted painfully and my mouth began to water. I forced myself to take my time removing the intestinal tract of the animal and setting it all aside, neat and without any breaks. The liver and kidneys followed because it was a carnivore, and I broke the ribs one at a time so that I could carefully manoeuvre the lungs aside.

Even now, there was at least ten kilos of meat left. There was a drain to one side of the corridor, and I used the pelt to tilt the carcass and let the blood run down it. I knew that blood was drinkable, but I didn’t fancy going that far just yet. It drained out quickly, and I heaved the carcass back to the edge of the sunlight once again.

My knife paused, hovering over the carcass, not because of indecision but because of the sheer amount of food laid out before me. Eventually, I chose the shoulder, where powerful muscles must explain why the creature had been such a fight to catch. I cut a swathe of meat off, having to saw through the tendons to come away with a chunk of meat larger than my hand, still slightly bloody, and still warm.

Thoroughly uncivilised. Then again, I supposed that was a good commentary on the Games themselves. I took a deep bite, feeling a rush of warmth and wetness in my mouth, and closed my eyes in faint ecstasy as I chewed my way through the first mouthful. Uncivilised and wonderful. I ate most of the muscle in one sitting, waited half an hour whilst I carved up the rest to ensure that it was not going to come back up again, and then gorged myself. Lean muscle, soft fat, and impulsively I broke open on of its leg bones to suck out some of the rich, fatty marrow.

It was a pity that the meat would not keep. I had read in old history books about peoples who ate rotten meat, in countries across the seas, but I doubted that I wanted to take that risk myself. So instead, I ate until my stomach hurt, then bundled up the rest of the meat and thought about what to do with it.

If I threw it into the water, it could poison the whole supply, which would not do me any good either. I supposed that it could at least attract insects or vermin if I did leave it to rot, but more likely it would just reek and the bacteria from its innards would make it dangerous as well. I packed up the heart into the silver case that the net had come in, along with a couple of chunks of the fattier meat, and put it safely into the middle of my pack. Hopefully, airtight, it would last at least until tomorrow.

The carcass looked thoroughly savaged by the time that I was finished with it. I wrapped it back up in the pelt as best I could when an idea occurred to me: if I was hungry, the Careers would probably only be hungrier. Perhaps even hungry enough to look twice at an animal carcass draped over the large rocks just outside the front of the stadium.

For lack of much better to do, I took the mutt, pelt and all, out to the front of the stadium and then tossed it over the steps. The pelt flicked the intestines out in a bloody string, sending the bones that I had cut apart rolling over the dirty ground. There was no going back from this, not if I wanted to avoid the risk of sickness. For a moment, I considered keeping the pelt, then dumped that on the ground as well, fur up. It would probably be the only animal anywhere outside of the water in this place, and hopefully it would be interesting just for that.

I retreated to the stands, got out my bow and arrow, and watched. The slope outside the stadium was relatively visible from all directions, and I had seen flickers of light down in the city before, quickly extinguished. The Careers had probably staked out territory down there – perhaps they thought that Kidagakash had claimed the stadium, rather than me and my tedium – and were waiting for the other stragglers to be foolish enough to cross their paths.

The cloud cover seemed to thin a little, letting some light through although it did not break enough to let the sky behind show. If this kept up for much longer, I was going to forget what sunshine looked like. I perched on the edge of a chair, arrow knocked but not drawn, watching over the carcass and feeling like a vulture.

The red splattered against the grey, the only lash of colour in this damned place. I had not realised before how strange it could be to be stuck in a monochrome world. After a while, my fingers started to grow slick on the bow, sticky with humidity, and my over-full belly felt barely less painful than my empty one had.

When part of the carcass moved, I thought at first that I was seeing things. Tilting my head, I had to squint slightly as I leant forwards, over the edge nearest to where I was sitting. Was a joint rolling downhill? No, one of the pieces of meat was definitely sliding sideways, apparently without anything moving it. The arrow slipped from my fingers as I leant still further forwards, and then in one swift move the meat simply disappeared.

Grey. I couldn’t even see where the meat had gone. Was there something underneath the ground? Annoyance boiling over, I replaced the arrow, drew it back to my ear, and sent it flying into the ground half a metre away from where the meat had been.

When it struck, I saw a ripple, and realised that it must be some sort of camouflaged sheet more effective than my jacket. Standing, I readied a second arrow, when a nimble shape darted out from beneath the sheet and, faster than I could take aim, disappeared beneath the eaves of the stadium and out of my sight. I recognised Pocahontas’s slight figure immediately, and could not help the burst of laughter that came out of me at the sight of her. Of all the unlikely survivors, she was still there, and for a moment I forgot that I was supposed to be killing her and marvelled at how strange the Games could be.


	13. Part Three - The Victor

If Pocahontas had made it this far, then let her have the meat. I put my weapons away and turned my back on the scene as the clouds began to darken, turning almost inky-black above me. At first, I retreated back to one of the players’ boxes at the side of the pitch, but as the thunder grew louder and the sky grew so dark that it might have been night, I heard the rattle of rainfall in the distance. Looking up, I realised belatedly that the roof of this box was, in fact, more holes than roof, and was not going to give me much protection.

I gathered the knives that I had been cleaning and headed back down the stairs, into the concrete tunnel that I had been sure was clear before I came down here. The rain would most likely run down the steps, most of the stadium roof having also rotted away, but I had noted a large chunk of concrete which had a relatively flat top to it, about two feet off the ground. With my jacket round my shoulders to protect me from the cold of the walls, I curled onto the block and into the corner and listened to the sound of the rain creep closer and closer.

The noise was almost unbearable by the time that it reached me, and I frowned at the sheer racket of it.  It was louder than any rain that I had ever heard before, even in buildings with metal roofs or... any other place that I could think of. I was on the verge of venturing above ground to see how it could possibly be making such a noise when I saw a lip form on the edge of the steps above me, fill up, and then trickle down.

It was slower than I would have expected. More like gravy, or custard, spilling over the edge of the pan. I watched cautiously as it dripped downwards, layer after layer, making its way slowly but surely down the steps and coating each one as it did so. After what seemed like an eternity, with the unspeakable pounding still going on above my head, it reached the landing on which I was sitting and began to spread out across it.

For a while, I simply watched. It was certainly as clear as water, and here or there little bubbles on the surface made it look like rain. But it was spreading more slowly than any water that I had ever seen, and there was an odd, acrid smell in the air. Eventually, it filled up the landing, spreading out both from the corner in which I sat and the one opposite, and continued down the next flight of stairs.

If there had been a stick, I would have poked that in first to see what happened. I cut the bottom couple of centimetres off one of the straps of my pack and tossed it in, just to see what happened. There was no knowing what the Gamemakers had come up with this time. The woven plastic fabric just sat on the surface and was slowly carried off towards the steps down. Finally, I rolled over where I was sitting, reached down with one hand, and gently brushed my little fingertip through the liquid.

My finger did not immediately fall off or burst into flame, so that was probably a good start. I lifted my hand back up again and looked more closely; it was definitely clear, but thick, and from this angle clearly not water. I was on the verge of sniffing it when I became aware of the slow burning pain that was coating the skin, the redness everywhere that the liquid had touched. It was growing, steady and fast, until it felt like every nerve in my finger was screaming at me and I thought that it was about to explode.

“Shit!” I wiped it against the rock I was sitting on, then fumbled for my medical kit and used one of the pieces of gauze to scrub the skin clean. It did not exactly help the pain, but it stopped it getting worse, which I would take for now. Poking through the kit, I found something that looked like burn ointment, and rubbing it over my finger certainly seemed to take the edge off. Better than nothing, I supposed.

So it looked like rain, it sounded like rain, but it most certainly was not rain. Most likely, it was a concoction of the Gamemakers’ own devising; we had some nasty chemicals in some of the processes we did in District One, but I couldn’t think of anything that acted like this. Nursing my finger, I settled back against the wall, grateful that I had found somewhere securely undercover.

That was when I heard the screaming.

Desperate, hoarse. It made me almost jumped out of my skin as it echoed down the tunnel that I was in, catching on the walls and reflecting back even louder. I recoiled, thinking no more clearly than any animal, my breathing fast and panicky until I realised that it was not coming closer, and that it was not as nearby as it at first seemed.

I had a small square of tarp in my pack, not large enough to use as a sleeping mat but enough to sit on, or to gain some protection. I folded it to a point and dipped it carefully into the liquid, waiting to see if it would eat through or react. It did not, and I withdrew it again, draping it over my head and shoulders so that I could hold it up with a minimal risk of any of the liquid touching my hands. Swinging my boots over the edge, I lowered them into the centimetre-deep liquid, again waited, and only when I was sure of myself started walking forwards and up the stairs to see where the screaming was coming from.

I was lucky; the section of the stadium that I was in still had some areas of roof left, and though the liquid ran swiftly about my boots it did not pour down on me from above. Above ground, the roar was almost deafening, and I cringed from it as I turned to survey the stadium.

The rain – for want of a better word – was torrential. So thick that it distorted the world around it, almost vertical sheets without the wind to angle it aside. Barely a metre away from me, a hole in the roof above let through a shaft of it that would have been as impenetrable as a pillar. And still the screaming surrounded me, bounced back in by the shape of the stadium even with its half-ruined walls.

I had to squint through the rain to see the figure in the grounds. They were on the ground, thrashing, and screaming.

Howling. Shrieking. Wailing. To say that she screamed barely did justice to the inhuman sounds that were leaving her lips, the desperation and agony in them that made me want to run as far away as I could, and at the same time run to help her. She was dressed in pale grey, the same colour we had all started in, and I could see that she was dark-haired, but even as I watched the grey turned to red, her skin disappeared beneath blood that seemed to seep out of her every pore, and steam or smoke seemed to bubble off her flesh.

I watched, transfixed and terrified, unable to look away. Eventually, the screaming stopped, she fell still, and though I could not hear a cannon I hoped for her sake that it was hidden by the continuing sound of the rain.

Only when she fell still did I realise that there was other movement in the stadium. Up by the roof, off to my right, was a nimble moving shape that had to be Pocahontas. To my left, and closer to the entrance, I could see a group of three people standing under cover, hastily shedding outer clothes and throwing aside stone paving slabs that they must have been carrying over their heads. The Careers. I wondered whether it was their fourth member now lying on the ground.

I considered shooting at them, but it was possible that they had not yet realised I was there. I spared a glance to note that Pocahontas must have fallen still, having found a safe place to perch, before concentrating on the Careers again.

Only three of them remained; I guessed by the silhouettes that it was Rourke and Helga, from Two, and Shan Yu from Six. From what I had seen, they all had, and were best with, hefty hand weapons, but I would not put it past Helga in particular to have ranged weapons with her. I had ten arrows left, and there were more of them than there were of me. Could I take them out at this range, perhaps fire before taking cover in the hope that they would not find me? Or could I risk combat in the maze that was the stadium, with safe dry paths broken and interweaving with the terrible rain?

I was just about ready to choose combat when I remembered the still body on the ground. Hayabusa, I realised, also of District Six. An unusual District to join the Careers pack, but stranger things have happened. What I had thought was smoke or steam was still hanging around her, like a mist, and as the rain began to thin it remained visible, hanging low in the air like a thick rug around her body.

Something was not right. And I knew, without even having to pause, that it was about to get worse.

I crouched down, trusting what remained of the seats around me to provide protection from the sight of the Careers, the muscles in my thighs straining to keep me clear of the liquid still running down the steps around me. The rain was definitely thinning, but once some visibility had returned it steadied, a threat but not a torrent. I doubted that my protective gear could take it, and suspected that any armour that could had long since disappeared into Kidagakash’s explosion.

At first, from where I waited, I could not work out what was happening. Nothing seemed to change, just the falling rain, the waiting Careers, the body on the ground. No hovercraft, which made me think that this rain was even worse than I had thought. Presumably it would damage something as strong as a hovercraft as well.

My first glimpse came from my right, through the ragged section of wall that led down the slope and towards the culvert. A thick mist was creeping up the slope, half-opaque like milk in water, rising upwards as the rivers in spring. I frowned, uncertain what it could be. It did not look like ordinary mist or fog; it did not have the greyish colour. Shifting slightly, I looked to the left and out through the other side of the stadium, and my heart almost stopped when I saw that the whole base of the Arena was covered in it, a thick level, even as water but rising steadily. It flowed around stones and stubs of walls, then swallowed them up as it flowed ever upwards.

If Hayabusa’s body had produced such a small pool, what could have produced this flood? The answer snapped into my brain: it was not her body, but the water in it. Whatever the liquid was, it reacted with water to make this gas.

I had thought that the culvert was just a source of water for the tributes, a test to see whether we would remember to clean it first. Now I realised that it was the first part of the Gamemakers’ trap.

A shiver ran through me. What else could be planned? Then again, I supposed that I had little time to think about that whilst the mist crept closer. Coming from the rain, it would be very painful, if not lethal. I felt a burst of gratitude that I had already been in the stadium – and that the gift of the net had been so perfectly timed to keep me there.

The edge of the mist crept onwards, close enough now that I could see the rolling edge of it, like steam coming from a kettle. To cover the whole Arena, the amount of it must be vast, and I wondered how deep it would become. The Gamemakers could not kill everyone – that would spoil the Games. Perhaps Pocahontas, up in the roof, would be the one to win after all. As the edge of the mist made it to the outside of the stadium, I decided to cut my losses, and started to make my way up the steps. Much of it remained sheltered, but after a couple of dozen rows of seats I had to move sideways, climbing over chairs to avoid an oval of the caustic rain.

Voices caught my attention. Cursing all over again, I turned just in time to see Helga raising, of all things, a crossbow, and aiming it in my direction. For a moment I froze, looking horrified, then as I saw the kick of her shoulder – letting me know the trigger had been pulled – I hit the floor.

The bolt skittered away behind me, but searing pain rushed through both of my hands, my cheek, where I had fallen into the liquid. I staggered to my feet, vision blurring with pain, and dispensed with subtlety. I ran up the steps, taking two at a time, throwing my tarp back over my head to give me what protection it could as I bolted through scattered patches of rain instead of trying to climb around them. A second bolt clipped past my hips, then there was a long pause before a third went wildly past my head.

I pushed more force into my running, bolting into the very highest seats were the roof came low and was still mostly intact. The left side of my face felt as if it was on fire, searing with pain and heat, my skin feeling tight and swollen. My sight in that eye was still wavering, fuzzy and with tears rolling down my cheek, and my nose and throat felt raw. As I reached the top, the more secure roof that gave better cover, I dropped the tarp and turned, reaching for my bow and arrow with hands that fumbled and burned with pain.

It was a struggle to knock the shaft on the string, even more of one to tilt my head so that I could look down the arrow with my good eye. I aimed at the middle of the three Careers, Helga, and loosed the arrow without lingering.

A gust of wind flicked it left, and I saw Shan Yu stumble back before reaching up with one huge hand to rip my arrow out. The crossbow was now in Rourke’s hands; he raised it and fired at me again, but I could tell that it was lazy and the bolt went way to my left. I drew back a second arrow – _eight left_ – and fired again, this time making them move apart to avoid it.

It would come down to how many bolts they had, and which of us was more accurate. I took deep breaths, wondering whether I could get close enough to fight hand-to-hand instead, and whether I could take on all three if I did make it that far. Before I could fire again, however, a figure exploded out of the entrance to the steps below me, and came charging up the stairs.

I whirled to face them, unable to see for a second with one misty eye and my heart pounding in my chest. I barely managed to raise the bow to knock aside the spear that was thrust towards me, and then I locked eyes with the tribute on the other side of it.

Hercules. District Five, with its power plants and good schooling and his female counterpart dead in the Bloodbath on the first day. He stabbed at me with the spear again, and this time I dodged aside, sliding low and blocking the wooden shaft with my forearm. I dropped the bow and loosed the staff from my back, sliding it out and into both hands.

A crossbow bolt cut between us, as if I wasn’t in enough danger with a six-foot tall boy whose muscles seemed to have only gotten more defined with hunger swinging a spear at me. I had to step aside from each thrust, knocking the shaft aside, but as the panic cleared I realised that Hercules didn’t really know how to _fight_. Not face-to-face. His strike against Rapunzel had been out of the blue, and I didn’t know if he’d killed anyone else. Every time he managed to control the spear, he simply attempted to stab me with it, trusting his strength to drive it through.

I may not have been as strong, but I was faster, and I knew what I was doing. I spun my staff, knocked his spear to the side and pinned it to the ground, metal to metal. It shifted my weight and I opened up, the thrill of the fight outreaching the pain in my hands and face, all of my weight dropping onto my right leg as I kicked, high and hard, with my left.

My foot caught Hercules beneath the chin, snapping his head back with a grunt of pain. Dropping my staff, I lunged in to bury one fist in his gut, doubling him over, using him like a marionette with each blow that I threw into place. A kick to his knee sent his feet flying from under him, landing him face-first in the liquid that poured across the ground. He roared with pain, the sound cut off as I stomped on the back of his neck, drew my knife from my belt, and bent to stab it through his spine.

This time, I heard the cannon. There was no time for pause, though, as I got to my feet, grabbing my staff again, and looked around wildly for the careers. They had moved, and I scanned around before catching sight of them further up the steps, moving across one of the paths that looped around the stadium at various levels. I picked up my staff again and readied myself, but Rourke had his hands cupped around his mouth to shout to me.

“Well done, District One! We’ve been looking for him for a while!”

Where they honestly still trying to recruit me to their pack, half way through the Games? I kept my eyes on them as Rourke laughed, then as Helga turned and snapped commands to both, pointing to me and then off to another part of the stadium. The boys nodded, and Shan Yu split off from the others, rising up another flight of steps to come level with me. He was no longer carrying the huge club, but had a great loop of rope over one shoulder and a huge, wavy-edged sword in his right hand. As he drew closer, I could see that blood stained the right side of his chest, but it did not seem to hinder his movements or stop him from advancing on me with a feral smile.

I risked a glance towards Rourke and Helga. Their eyes were fixed elsewhere as they moved along the path a tier down, too fast for it to be an effective way of hunting me.

“District One,” growled Shan Yu, dragging my attention back to him as he came within four metres of me. “Fa Ping, yes? Your father killed my uncle in the Quell. Time to restore the _family honour_.”

His tone mocked the words that I had used in my interviews, the words that had become my little phrase repeated across the Capitol. I was doing this for honour, I had said, for my father. For District One.

I had never said that I was doing this for my brother, or for my life. But it was those things, especially the latter, that were foremost in my mind as I readied my staff and tried not to quail before the sharp-toothed smile of Shan Yu.


	14. Chapter 14

From the way that Shan Yu was licking his lips, I wondered whether he might be the one to turn to cannibalism after all. He was huge, well over six feet tall, with high hulking shoulders that seemed to bury his head with its long black hair. Some sort of inserts made his eyes shine gold, and his teeth had been sharpened to points. His stylists must have gone to town.

He handled the sword as if it was no heavier than a dagger, when it had to be at least a metre long. And, more than Hercules, he handled his weapon as if he knew what he was doing with it.

His first swing seemed almost experimental, a round slash that whistled in the air. My staff spun in my hands to block it with the metal tip, but I felt the blow judder up my arm and almost throw me sideways. I pushed the sword aside, but immediately it was on me again, a hearty thrust from which I could only step aside, the edge of the blade almost going over my thigh.

Not waiting to breathe, to think, I punched Shan Yu in the face. I heard something crack, but with the pain in my knuckles it could have been in me rather than him. He barely even blinked, and then backhanded me in return, his heavy hand slamming into the side of my face. I felt my teeth rattle in my jaw, and blackness flashed across my vision – and that was not even the side seared by my earlier fall into the liquid. By the time my vision cleared, the sword was heading towards me again, and I could barely bring the staff into place in time.

It cracked beneath the blow, but held, and this time I decided on some underhand, and probably rather un-manly, tactics.

My foot connected squarely with Shan Yu’s groin.

I could imagine the groans and laughter in the Capitol as the giant of a boy doubled over, wheezing something that might have been a filthy curse on me and my family, but didn’t matter in the circumstances. Before he could straighten up, I bought my staff round and down onto the back of his neck, metal first. It snapped in two in the middle, but he stumbled forwards, and I gave him a helpful shove along the way.

He did not fall far – only down to the next tier, and a few extra steps. But he did not have to. As soon as he was falling, I was switching to my bow, drawing an arrow, and sending it flying into the time-weakened, brittle roof.

More by luck than intention, I caught one of the metal supports that webbed out above us, and it broke with the arrow’s momentum. The support began to peel downwards, splitting the roof above it like the skin of a peach, sending down a great pouring rush of liquid, heavy as a waterfall. It caught Shan Yu just as he was rising to his knees, and he gave a great cry, a scream, of pain that echoed round the stadium. From this distance, I could see his skin flash red, blister, then erupt with blood that ran down his face, making red streams in the liquid. I could not help the horror that overwhelmed me as I saw the skin of his face melting away, revealing the white bone beneath, and then the crashing sound of the water made me realise that the separating roof was still heading up towards me.

Turning, I continued up the steps. Pain was still searing in my hands and face, throbbing in my knuckles and cheekbone. As I reached the top tier, the roof barely ten feet above my head, I turned and moved along the uppermost of the circular paths. The tearing of the roof reached the edge of the stadium and stopped, a huge triangle of sky exposed above, and I realised that I was breathing heavily, heart pounding, terror flooding my veins.

A cannon went off, announcing that Shan Yu had finally died. I hadn’t realised how long he would last.

  
  
  
  


Away from immediate danger, the pain from the liquid seemed to force itself into my attention. Tears were still streaming down the left side of my face, and the vision on that side was blurred as I looked down at my hands to see small bloody blisters covering them. I dropped my bag onto one of the seats beside me and rifled through for my medical kit, feeling the skin on my hands peeling off but so full up with pain that it was as if there was no room for any more to add to it.

I found the same ointment that I had used earlier and which had seemed to work on the fingertip, and smeared it over the palms of my hands. This time, taking the edge off the pain was more than enough to make me whimper with relief, and I streaked some around my face as well. It was too sore to rub in, so I hoped that just having it on the surface would be enough.

Thoughts clearing, I finally remembered that Rourke and Helga were in the Arena as well, and spun round. The rain was getting lighter, but I still could not see them, and when I tried to switch back to my bow and arrows my hands were shaking too much to do so.

The mist had carpeted the floor of the stadium, hiding the uneven ground and with only the uppermost points of the large boulders and some golden shards of the Cornucopia still visible. From its rippling, it looked as if it was still rising. I chose a perch at the back of the stadium that had managed to remain dry and sat down, going to put my hands on my knees before the pain made it clear that was completely out of the question. I couldn’t climb much further without going into the roof structure itself, and while Pocahontas was light enough to do that, I wasn’t sure that I was. I couldn’t even remember where my tarpaulin had ended up, and going on top of the roof without it wasn’t much of an option. There was a while before that was going to be needed, however.

I tried to drink some water, only for my stomach to revolt and vomit it back up again. The heaves threw me forwards, almost onto my hands and knees, but I managed to keep my balance as the water spewed out of me. Wherever it hit a patch of the rain, it sent up wisps of white mist.

Shaking, I straightened up again and looked around me again. For a moment, there was still no-one to be seen, then I looked straight across the stadium to the far stands, where the seats were little more than lines of darker grey on lighter. There was movement; at first I thought that it might be Rourke and Helga, but then I realised that there were too many figures, and a flash of bright blue made me certain. Kidagakash, and those still with her. I wondered how – and why – she had kept so many of them alive.

Staying still and wearing what I was, I supposed that from the distance I would be relatively camouflaged. Despite the fact that I was still in close range of the other tributes, I did not particularly want to fight any more. I hoped that the Gamemakers would not try to ‘encourage’ me into more kills, but figured that today had been more than busy enough that they would have plenty of material for their screens. Besides, this Games was burning up far faster than previous ones had done, deaths coming in hours rather than over days or weeks.

Unusual. From the Arena to the pace to the way that the tributes were behaving, it was all unusual.

My mouth and throat were sore, though I could barely notice it compared to my hands and face. Tentatively, I reached up to touch my cheek, but could not clearly feel anything. There was no texture, barely anything other than pressure beneath my fingertips. It sent a chill down me. I pulled back the sleeve of my jacket ten centimetres or so and pressed the inside of my arm to my cheek instead, sending a slash of pain across my face, but finally realising that my skin was puffy to the touch, oily with the ointment I had smeared over it. I snatched my arm away and tried not to think about it too much, wrenching my sleeve back into place.

The mist was still creeping up. It now completely covered the floor of the stadium, had crawled up the low walls around it, and was spilling over the top into the lowest row of the seats. As far as I could tell, all of the others had made the same decision that I had: to sit and to watch.

The rain was now so light that it was barely more than drizzle, not enough to hinder our vision but a warning that we should not venture out beneath it. Also enough, apparently, to keep the hovercraft away from coming to collect the bodies. I tried not to think about the rain eating them away, and failed miserably. With it, the sound had dulled, though my head still pounded in its aftermath.

At first, I thought that I might have been imagining the trumpets that cut through the sound of the rain, but as they continued I looked around and up to the sky. There, on the dull grey of the clouds, appeared the Capitol Seal; then it faded, and Snow White, the face of the Games, appeared. Her lips were the same colour as the blood that had been spilled in here.

“Good afternoon, tributes.” She didn’t have that same cheeriness that a lot of the other Capitol people that I had met did, and for that I was grateful. Instead her voice was soothing, calming, more like a teacher talking to her favourite class. “Now, I’m here to invite you all to a Feast, tomorrow at one hour after dawn, in the stadium – but there’s one little catch. I’m afraid that we’ve only got eight chairs. So, unless there’s one fewer of you before too long...  I’m afraid we might just have to cancel the Feast.”

She winked out once again.

Eight places. Nine of us left? I must have missed another of the cannons in the sound of the thunder; I remembered ten. But one more would have to die before the Gamemakers’ latest round of horrors was done. Another twist that I didn’t remember seeing in earlier Games.

I didn’t want to kill any more today. Rourke, Helga, Kidagakash... they would take too much energy, too much adrenaline that I didn’t have after two fights and the pain from everywhere that the rain had touched me. I could not help the fear that it was still at work, still eating away at my skin, but the fact that it still hurt actually reassured me at this point. If it had burnt much deeper, my nerves would have been destroyed as well, and the pain would stop. There was only so far that it could have reached.

I shook my head to myself. Hopefully Rourke and Helga would go after Kidagakash’s group, and I would be able to avoid the brawl. Unless the Gamemakers had something else in mind again, in which case, let it come. I was too tired to care.

  
  
  
  


At least at first, there was nothing. No movement from the group that I could faintly see opposite me, no sign of what was left of the Careers. Another whiff of the acrid smell hanging in the air made me cough, and before I knew it I was coughing so hard I could barely cling to my seat, black spots appearing in my vision, blood coppery in my mouth. I fought to control my breath and drew my hand away from my mouth to see a streak of red.

Although the mist was far below me, it was still rising higher. I had my suspicions.

Perhaps it would have been easier if one of the others had just come over and kill me then. Spitting blood and burning up, I probably would not have put up much of a challenge. Then it would be eight, the others could go to the Feast, and the Capitol could cover up my treachery as if it had never happened. My head whirled, and I looked desperately for any way that I could go higher up, but there was only the roof above me.

I almost thought that I was hallucinating when I saw movement, to my right, up on top of the roof. The tiny figure of Pocahontas, wrapped in some dark fabric that must have been waterproof or similarly protective, was up on top of the roof, the rain falling around her. She should have been safe up there, but – again I squinted, my left eye still streaming – she seemed to be backing away from something, moving towards the edge.

Struggling to my feet, I moved around to my left, bringing her into a clearer field of view. It _had_ to be her: there was no other as small, and I doubted there were any that could move so fast. As I watched, she dodged sharply to the side, from something that I could not see, then ducked and moved along the ground almost on all fours. Something shot past her, a black flicker among the falling rain, but I still could not see what was going on.

Suddenly, she screamed, and grabbed her leg, falling to her hip and still trying to scramble away. I rose to my feet, remembering her at the reaping: a slip of a girl, with shiny dusky skin and hair that disappeared down beneath the picture that they had used to reveal her score. Seven – good, for someone from her District. Her stylist had not dressed her and Kocoum so much in costumes as in themes, the same way that Wei had dealt with us: they had worn gold, patterned to suggest grain, with shots of green to suggest leaves and stalks. In her interview, she had been quiet, mild and innocent, doubtless capturing the heart of those who had watched.

She might have softened mine as well.

I tried to hold my bow and draw an arrow, but my hands would not answer me and my weapons slipped from my loose grasp. When Rourke appeared on top of the stadium roof, I supposed that I should have expected it. He was wearing some sort of armour that glinted in the light; it must have cost a fortune to the sponsor or sponsors that sent it to him. Whatever it was made of, doubtless it would protect him from weapons as well as from the terrible rain of the Gamemakers.

He was still holding the crossbow, but as he advanced on Pocahontas he slung it over his shoulder. I expected him to draw a sword, but he did not. Again, I struggled to hold my weapons, this time just about getting a grip on the bow and managing to put the arrow to it, but as soon as I tried to draw, I felt it cut into my skin and I gave a cry, releasing it again.

My breath choked in my throat as the blood ran down my fingers, the skin split in clean lines. Before I could summon even thoughts, a scream rang through the air.

I turned, tauter than the bowstring, head snapping round to Pocahontas once again. Rourke held her on one arm, hand wrapped around her neck, even as she fought in his grasp like a fish on a hook and screamed for longer than I thought that any breath could last.

“No!” It came out involuntarily, choked and tasting of blood, and with a wrench of my arm and ignoring the pain I drew an arrow and loosed it, cleanly, in Rourke’s direction.

The wind caught, and it missed. But it did not matter anyway. Rourke had taken Pocahontas to the edge, lifting her over, and released her into the terrible yawning maw of the stadium below. As she fell, her face was exposed, and her scream began to bubble as she wheeled in the air, a terrible shape falling, floating down, sharp against the mist, until she was swallowed up by it and her scream was cut off.

A moment later, there was a cracking, thudding sound as her body hit the hidden ground below. Then the cannon fired, and all was still again.


	15. Chapter 15

Rourke laughed, and I wanted to tear him apart with my bare hands. But even in the seconds after the cannon fired, the rain petered out and stopped. The clouds started to move away as quickly as if they were being sucked out – perhaps they were – and the tide of the mist turned as it began to lower away once again. I raised my bow once again, my hands shaking but my teeth gritted, and fired one more of my rapidly diminishing arrows.

I saw it hit, in a flash of metal, but it bounced away and skittered over the roof. As I lowered my aim, breathing through my mouth but with my throat still raw and tasting of blood, Rourke turned and raised his hand to me as if in salute.

“District One! It shouldn’t be long before we see you again. At the Feast tomorrow, perhaps?”

He laughed. I suppressed the urge to make an obscene gesture by telling myself that it was not something that Ping would do. Instead, I forced as much of my things as I could back into my pack, folded down my bow, and shouldered my things. This second Bloodbath had gone on more than long enough for my liking.

I practically fled from the stadium. Running was impossible, and I could only walk so fast before the jolting of my own steps became too much for my injuries, but I did my best to keep moving. Rourke could decide not to wait until tomorrow, or he could start an all-out battle with Kidagakash’s group. And there was still another tribute unaccounted for, unless I had missed more cannons than I realised during the terrible drumming of the rain.

I made my way down a few streets, then wove through the ruins of houses until, I hoped, I was out of sight of the stadium and would not have been followed. I found somewhere dry to sit, and tried applying more cream to my face and hands. This time, it didn’t seem to help so much, and I gritted my teeth against sobbing although I could still feel tears rolling down my cheeks. I told myself that it was just watering from the smoke hurting my eyes.

The sky darkened, and time blurred as pain burned across my skin and into my flesh. I curled into the corner where I had hidden myself, shaking, struggling to find any angle to rest my head at that did not result in stabs of pain. It was impossible to imagine fighting in such a state; I could not even get the meat out of my bag to eat.

The sky was darkening when a flutter of silver caught my eye, a third parachute. Many tributes in the past had been almost showered with gifts, given so many that they had not even been able to retrieve them all without having some of them stolen by others. I leapt out, grabbed it, and retreated to my corner again in case anyone else had seen it and decided to come near.

There was only one thing that I could imagine it being. The clasps were so tight that I felt more skin getting pulled off my fingers before I managed to open it, leaving smears of blood on the small black packet. Finally managing to rip it open, I found a small tube, and the moment that I squeezed some out onto my finger I could feel relief flash like ice on the skin.

“Thank you,” I whispered, then, louder and looking up to the sky: “Thank you, _thank you_.”

I smeared the cream over my face first, this time being relieved enough to even rub it very gently into the skin. I dribbled some water into the corner of my eye and blinked it out again, feeling it wash away some of the pain that was there as well.

As the terrible pain receded, I managed to drag together the remnants of my thoughts and piece them into something solid. My face, as much as I could see it in the reflective surface of the silver tube, was reddened and blistering, but it had done better than my hands. They were stripped raw, red and white streaks of flesh visible underneath. Nausea hit me again. I had to breathe deeply until the black spots in front of my vision passed, and swallow several times, before looking up and away to the pale blue sky.

Compared to the burns, the other pains in my body were minor. My joints ached from fighting, and the knuckles of my right hand sparked with pain every time that I tried to move them. My head throbbed. I could sip water without my body throwing it up again, though, and I finally managed to bring myself to eat some more of the meat that I had gathered earlier that day. I was grateful for the tight seal that had kept it safe.

As time wore on, the sky darkened, and I huddled back into my corner even as tiredness and fear warred over whether I should sleep or not. My body was starting to feel dull, distant. It was an effort to look up as the anthem played, and the Seal was painted across the sky.

The Capitol must have been falling over themselves. After two days without deaths, especially so early on, they would have been all put panting for some violence and bloodshed once again. There was only so much that could be interesting about watching us scrabble for water and try not to starve to death. Even I, interested in what it took to survive in the Arenas, had felt myself becoming impatient after a while.

So the Gamemakers had rolled out the tension and the drama, and had the body count to show for it. I kept sipping water as the faces began to show. Hercules, from District Five. Shan Yu and Hayabusa, both from District Six. Pocahontas from District Nine – my heart ached just looking at her picture, how young she looked, no matter how much I tried to remind myself that it was what we were sent in here for. And, to my surprise, Tarzan from District Eleven. I could not remember hearing a cannon for him, and had not seen him in the Arena. Perhaps he had met with one of the others, before the rain and the mist, or perhaps he had been killed by one of those artificial horrors. In any case, it did not matter: we had our eight. And now they were giving us until the morning, and the Feast, to recuperate. Doubtless the Capitol was waiting breathlessly for it.

I tried to get comfortable against cold concrete, with about as much success as could be expected, and waited as keenly as the Capitol vultures.

  
  
  
  


The sky was so perfectly clear that I could see it begin to lighten well before dawn actually came. It had been comforting watching the stars, tracing the same constellations as I had seen at home, no matter where I was. Add to that the silence from the cannons, and the night might almost have passed for peaceful.

As dawn came closer, I ate the last of the meat which I had packed, applied another layer of cream to my burns, and readied what weapons I had. My staff was broken, and I was down to five arrows, leaving me with only my knife and my own body to count on. I knew that Kidagakash and her pack were well-equipped, but that they would also be running short on food, and I doubted that she would be as foolish as I had been and eat raw meat. What was left of the Careers would have no choice but to be there.

Of course, there was always a possibility that there would be no food at all, or that there would be a trick. Would the Gamemakers dare to lace the food with poison? I had never seen it happen, but I remembered commenting to my father years ago that it would be an easy way. He had just shaken his head, and said quietly that it would not happen.

I supposed he was right. It was far more entertaining for the Capitol to make us kill each _other_ instead.

I could probably have outlasted the others, I knew that. If there had not been a Feast, all that I would have needed to do was keep fishing, keep hoping that raw meat would not make me sick, and protect myself if any of the other tributes came after me. But if there _was_ food at the Feast, I was just about done for. This was just about the sparsest Games that I had ever seen, in terms of supplies, and I was stuck right in the middle of it.

At the very least, I would have to see. There was bound to be fighting, but if there was no food to be had then I would get away from it as best I could and go back to my survival strategies. If there was food, then fighting would not be an option; it would be a necessity.

I was still wondering how the hell I was going to achieve anything as I started to make my way cautiously towards the stadium in the thin pre-dawn light. The moon had already set. There were plenty of entrances to the stadium, plenty of hiding places and shadowed corners where ambushes could be laid. Thinking of Pocahontas, I reminded myself to check the roof as well.

I made it to the shadows of the stadium without incident, camouflage jacket on, knife in my hand. Slipping into one of the many entrances, around some buckled metal which scratched my thighs and which I hoped would have deterred others, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Feasts were usually secondary Bloodbaths. What surprised me the most, though, in a grim sort of way, was the fact that it had come so close after the whittling down of the group to eight.

Back home, they would be interviewing friends and family now. My throat suddenly constricted at the thought; if I was here, then they would be looking to interview Mulan. Wei would be bought in as the stylist for my family, as he had been mine, and my father’s many years ago. If I had been the praying sort, I would have prayed for them then.

They must have done the interviews for tonight, preparing them to be interspersed with the news of the Feast. Not something that I had seen before, but somehow it did not surprise me. Or perhaps they would only show the interviews with the families of those who came out alive.

If more than one person even did come out alive.

I wondered afresh why Kidagakash was keeping those with her alive. In the earlier times, I could have understood – it was good to have allies, or distractions, or generally other people around. It staved off loneliness, spread the load of what you had to carry, and meant that you could work together. This late in the Games, however, it seemed like madness to still have a group of five people, four of whom clearly had no fighting skill. There were survival Arenas, and there were fighting Arenas, my father had once said. This was clearly the latter. And they had all seemed to _trust_ her, a ridiculous idea when only one person was to leave alive. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was able to take a watch one night and kill them all whilst they were asleep, without any of them making a sound. Then there would only be four of us left, all Careers, and the more traditional showdown could begin.

I judged it to be dawn as I crept up the stairs, one step at a time, with my knife still ready in my hand. When I reached the top I dropped to a crouch, settled myself behind a couple of broken seats that would get rid of my silhouette, and looked around the stadium.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then a flicker of movement overhead caught my eyes, and I looked up to see Rourke patrolling on the roof. He had the crossbow in his hands, and I had no doubt that he was still wearing the armour that he had been given yesterday. There was no sign of Helga, though.

A flash of blue made me reach for my bow and arrow, but as I turned I realised that it was just a scrap of fabric, tied to one of the pieces of metal in the mess at the base of the stadium. Not that I could remember it being there before. I was still watching it, frowning, when I realised that I was not all that far from where I had fought Hercules the previous day. If I was lucky, his spear would still be here, not taken by the hovercraft. Though spears were not my weapon of choice, they were better than nothing, and had more reach than a knife.

I waited until Rourke’s back was towards me, then ran nimbly up the flight of steps to the level where Hercules and I had fought. The concrete was dry, and to stay behind the chairs I crawled on my hands and knees, breathing a sigh of relief when the spear came into view at the next landing, still in place. Another glance to be sure that I was out of Rourke’s sight, then I snatched it from the ground and drew it back into cover with me.

It was not a good weapon. It was not a _bad_ weapon, and frankly any weapon right now was a good thing, but it was not well-made and had not been well-used. The shaft did not properly balance the head, and the edges were knocked and marked. There was still dried blood on it, and I pushed the image of Rapunzel out of my mind at the touch. But it was a weapon all the same.

Slowly, the sunlight became stronger. At least the Gamemakers had deigned to give us a clear sky to judge when it was one hour after sunrise. Even so, I could feel myself starting to grow impatient as time wore on and my muscles cramped from staying crouched out of sight.

“Come on,” I could not help muttering to myself, no matter how useless it might be. Doubtless there would be tiny cameras recording this; perhaps the Gamemakers would even be using it. District One’s male tribute, desperate for action again, despite the wounds he still carried. I was faintly disgusted with myself, but stronger than the disgust was the desire to live, and the sheer fact that I was sick of being stuck in this Arena and playing this Game at all. I just wanted to go home, hold my father tightly, and not have to wake up knowing that people were waiting for me to kill someone.

Normally, a Feast was raised up from underground, but after what Milo had done on the first day I doubted that was going to be a possibility. It did not surprise me when two hovercrafts came into view, larger than the usual ones, with a large container suspended beneath them. Despite myself, I thought of food, and my mouth began to water. I would have traded all the rations and raw meat in the world for one apple; I would have traded all the _apples_ in the world for one mouthful of my grandmother’s steamed eggs.

Eight people left. Seven people standing between me and home. I could do that.

The hovercrafts manoeuvred to the centre of the stadium, right above the destroyed ground, and began to descend. Once they reached about twenty feet, the container almost flush with the ground, they stopped, and winches lowered it the rest of the way. A metallic clang echoed round the stadium. I heard the change in the pitch of the hovercrafts’ engines, the lessening of the strain on them, and as they lifted away they took the top and sides of the container with them, revealing the food beneath.

And oh, what food it was. The table must have been six metres long, a metre wide, and it was full to bursting. Fat glazed meats, bowls of ripe fruit shining as the sunlight creeps over the edge of the stadium to catch at them, loaves of bread cut open to reveal their fluffy white interiors, bright silver fish, pitchers of water and milk and goodness only knew what else. There had to be enough food there for a hundred people to eat well, and even as I stood in awe of it, a sickening realisation washed over me.

The Gamemakers wanted this fight to be the last.

It was an excessive amount of food, obscene. Enough that any of us watching, and beginning to feel the claws of hunger in our bellies, would surely be going mad with desire just at the sight of it. I had found fresh meat, gorged myself on it, and still I could feel the call in my brain. Food is survival, it reminded me. Survival is winning. And winning is going home. But this was no one-man packet of lifesaving rations, designed to let someone carry on a little longer and have a small edge. This amount of food was meant to be killed for, because whoever did not have control over it would never have a chance of surviving against whoever did.

The sixth day, and the Gamemakers wanted the Games to finish already. Not only would we have the smallest Arena in history, we would have the most deaths as well. It was difficult to hold on to the thought, though, as my stomach twisted in hunger and my brain raced to try to plan my next move, and it was taken out of my hands anyway as the other remaining tributes sprang into action.


	16. Chapter 16

Rope snapped down from close to where Rourke must have been standing, above me. It cracked like a whip as it unfurled, reaching all the way down to barely above the ground level. I craned my neck to see the top, but a slender form had already leapt on and was sliding down, fast – Helga, blonde braid whipping about her, face set in a grimace. She had cloth wrapped around her hands as she dropped, landing heavily but without any sign of pain, and some sort of translucent grey fabric that covered her from neck to ankles. I started, almost reaching for my bow and arrows, but there was every chance that she was wearing armour as well. It would not do to waste what few arrows I had left.

I rose to my feet, ready to run down and damn the danger, when the rubble almost at Helga’s feet seemed to split open. Kidagakash erupted out of nowhere with what sounded like a war cry, no spear in her hand but the flash of a knife visible, and slammed bodily into Helga before the other girl could react. I could remember no camouflaged material among the things we had taken from the Cornucopia, five days that seemed a lifetime ago, until I remembered the one that Pocahontas had been hiding under.

The two struggled viciously, all tight punches and grappling, muffled curses spat onto the air from time to time at what must have been snatched moments of spare breath. Helga slammed a fist into Kidagakash’s middle, but in return got her head wrenched back and was almost thrown to the ground before she managed to regain her feet.

Something smacked into the ground near to them. A crossbow bolt; Rourke must have been firing on both at once, not caring who he hit. Well, I had always known that the Careers turned on each other sooner or later. It was just that usually there were more of them left, and fewer other tributes. Another bolt, and then a third, so close that I could barely believe it did not hit at least one of them. He had to be well-supplied to be using so many of them. He must have been doing very well on sponsorship money, or using gifts meant for pack members who had since died.

One of the bolts hit the ground at their feet, and then the camouflaging fabric was flung aside with a shove to reveal Milo, grey smears on his face and with a pack hanging empty in one hand. Before Rourke could fire again, Milo jumped to his feet, crossed the few feet to the table, and launched himself up and over it. It was only then that I thought to look at the table itself, beneath the groaning weight of food, and see that it was solid. Impossible to crawl under to hide – but a good barrier, if you could get on to the other side of it. I could see Milo, half-crouched, starting to grab food and stuff it into the bag that he held, despite the bolts now aiming at him instead, still two or three a minute. One of them seemed to skim across his shoulder, but I could not see from this distance exactly what had happened.

I could not sit out any longer. The best way to avoid becoming Rourke’s target would be to move now, whilst we were still at our densest, and I hoped that the rest of Kidagakash’s pack were not waiting with slings or throwing knives.

I plunged down the steps two at a time. My pack slid round my shoulder and I pulled it round to the front, slipping open the drawstring. Get food and get out. Let the others fight it out, and come back when things had thinned out somewhat, or I could figure out how to deal with Rourke. I hit the ground running, hands and face still burning with pain but my body feeling better for moving, and only slowed when I met with the uneven, shattered area of ground.

Slabs of concrete sloped back and forth, and a thin cloud of dust still hung in the air from where the table had kicked it up. Gravel skidded under my feet. I lunged towards the table, grabbing at the nearest food which seemed reasonable – fruit, bread, foil-wrapped blocks which I hoped would be something more akin to survival rations – and putting it into my bag as fast as I could. A crossbow bolt thudded into the table not twenty centimetres from my hand, but I kept going, my heart pounding in my chest.

Part of me wanted to _fight_. Fight rather than scavenge, turn and face the others. But for the sake of survival, I held it back, forcing myself to concentrate on filling my bag and think of filling my belly.

Milo moved closer to me as he ducked down again, then crawled a couple of metres before popping up. I threw him a glance, warning him as well as checking how close he had come, then grabbed one of the large bottles of orange juice and stuffed it into my bag despite the weight it would put on. He would not fight me.

He took a jerky step, then hissed something that was lost beneath an outraged scream from Helga, on the other side of the table. I looked up to see Kidagakash, blood on her face, bring down her dagger in a vicious arc that disappeared out of my sight. Helga was down; it was time for me to go.

Silver in the corner of my vision made me look round sharply. Milo had a knife in his hand, knuckles almost white with the tightness of his grip, and before he could turn against me I crossed the space between us in two steps and slammed my first into his face.

He snapped back, then lost his footing and fell to the ground in an ungainly sprawl. With Helga gone, we would be down to only seven tributes, and this was no time to be respecting alliances which I had broken days ago. No matter how _honourable_ it might seem. I grabbed a long, rusted piece of metal from the rubble, pointed its wickedly sharp end towards him, and steadied my aim just over his heart.

For a shattering instant, my eyes met his. There was fear there, of course... and surprise. As if he had honestly thought he could win. The knife fell from his hand, and he made no move to oppose me, as I stepped forward to gather my weight and-

A foot hit the injured side of my face. Bright lights exploded in my vision, and I might have screamed, as I was thrown sideways onto the ground myself. Sharp concrete bit into my side, knocked against my head, but all that I could feel was the splitting skin on my cheek and the pain that threatened to squeeze my eye out of its socket. Blue blurred across my vision, then I realised that Kidagakash was leaning over me, hand wrapping around my throat, dagger still raised in her hand.

I struggled, trying to cry out, but I could feel where her fingers had locked tightly onto my jugular, pressing down with blunt precision. Within seconds, dark spots were filling my vision, my head growing heavy with blood.

My head fell back, body growing slack even as my mind screamed. The last thing that I saw before my vision went completely was Kidagakash, leaning over me, and it surprised me that there was no triumph in her expression.

  
  
  
  


I was surprised to open my eyes again. My stomach lurched, and I thought I might vomit, but regained myself and tried to make my way up again. I made it to my hands on knees, managed to interpret the sounds that I was hearing as words, Kidagakash ordering Milo to run, Rourke bellowing in fury far above me.

The ground felt as if it was shifting beneath my feet, and the roof seemed to be moving. Squinting, I realised that at least the second part of that was almost _right_ : something, someone, was moving in the roof. I recognised Quasimodo’s silhouette as he grabbed hold of the rope which Helga had swung down, climbing up it nimbly, and leapt out right in front of Rourke. The crossbow was knocked from Rourke’s hands as Quasimodo grabbed hold of him and, with a furious shout, threw him from the edge of the roof.

Just as Rourke had done to Pocahontas the previous day.

It might have ended the same way, as well, had Rourke had grabbed hold of Quasimodo’s ankle as he fell, dragging the younger boy with him. They both fell for a heart-stopping instant, then Quasimodo reached out for the rope with both hands, a pained cry ripping from his lips as he skidded down it. The rope smeared red with his blood, but they stopped, still at least ten metres from the ground.

Even I, as a Career, would have been thinking about my own survival first. But Rourke pulled a knife from his belt, expression manic, and reached up to thrust it into Quasimodo’s thigh. It slid in up to the handle, blood spurting from the wound, and another cry on Quasimodo’s lips faded to a whimper before his arms went slack, and they fell again.

They hit the ground heavily. The giddiness in my body finally dissipating, I struggled to my feet, once again picking up the metal spike that I had been wielding. To my right, Milo cut away the charred fabric straps that had twisted themselves around his leg and, as Kidagakash had commanded him, ran. The She-Devil herself was already leaping back over the table, running towards Quasimodo and Rourke in their slumped heap.

Run or fight. The only two options that ever existed in the Games. Choosing my weapon over my pack, I slung myself round over the table as well, kicking aside a bowl and scattering fat purple cherries all over the now heavily-stained white tablecloth. My eyes fixed on Rourke, getting to his feet with bright red blood sprayed across his chest, so intently that I did not even notice the arms reaching for my calves until it was too late.

For a second time, I fell to the ground, throwing my arms up to protect my face. I rolled to see Helga, bruises starting to flower on her temple and blood matting in her hair, her eyes glazed but fixed upon me. She pulled a slim tube from her belt and pointed it straight towards me; I recognised it instantly as a Microbolt, a District Two speciality weapon which put the power of a crossbow into a device barely bigger than a tube of lipstick. They only had one shot, but that shot was a powerful one. Adrenaline and fear struggled in me as I kicked her arm aside and scrambled to my feet again, but by the time that I turned round a cannon was already sounding overhead.

Quasimodo lay in a pool of blood, arterial-bright. Over him stood Kida, teeth bared in a snarl, dagger in hand; Rourke faced her, not quite daring yet to reach for the sword at his hip. Without quite daring to turn my back on Helga, who was slowly getting to her feet, I circled round so that I stood about two metres from Kidagakash, waiting for the flicker of her eyes in my direction to show that she knew I was there.

“One last alliance, for old times’ sake?” I said through gritted teeth.

If we had all been Careers, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so angry. If it had been me, or Maleficent, or Kidagakash, that Rourke had thrown off the roof the previous day, perhaps it wouldn’t have felt so underhand. But it had always been watching the Reapings that killed me, knowing that the tributes from other districts would not be prepared in the way that I was.

“Why, Kida,” said Rourke, a slightly manic edge to his voice, “it looks like the boy’s sweet on you.”

He drew his sword and pointed it towards the both of us, even as Kida growled in frustration and sank her stance a little further.

“Go, Fa Ping,” she said, shaping my name carefully. “This is not your fight.”

Her eyes flickered in my direction once again, but the only move that I made was to drop my weight down and ready the makeshift weapon in my hand. Rourke had wanted uneven odds; let him taste them now.

“Eeny...” Rourke’s sword moved back and forth between Kidagakash and me, “meeny... miney...” The sword came to rest on me. “Mo.”

He did not get any further. Helga walked up beside him, raised the Microbolt to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

Even Careers thought twice about attacking their District partners, and then it was usually when there were only Careers left and squabbles had started to break out among them. Despite the fights that had erupted over the Feast, there had been only one death: Quasimodo’s. And Helga and Rourke had been working together from the beginning.

Perhaps that was why Rourke’s face fell into a look of slack surprise as the bolt went in through his temple, so hard that it cracked through his skull on the other side and protruded as a bloody spike. He collapsed slowly, knees first, then his waist, the sword not falling from his hand until he was keeled over on the floor.

Helga looked round to us, a slight smile tilting up one side of her mouth. Rourke’s cannon sounded. “Six?” she offered.

I could almost feel the anger radiating off Kidagakash, barely even needing to look at her tight-limbed posture, the glare in her eyes. “This is not how it was supposed to end,” she ground out, making a slashing gesture with the knife in her hand. “This was not how it was supposed to be.”

Helga sneered. “The Games end with twenty-three bodies, and I don’t really want to be one of them. Rourke was getting too cocky. If you didn’t want to do it, you shouldn’t have volunteered, _She-Devil_.”

“You do not und-”

The next words were cut off as the ground cracked and popped, then a hollow boom rung out from beneath us. The world roared, grey dust and gravel filling my vision, and I heard a scream that could have been anyone’s as everything crashed away.


	17. Chapter 17

I wasn’t sure whether or not I even fell unconscious. The next thing that I heard was cannons, three in a row echoing in the air and sending new trickles of dust down onto my face with each one. Groggily, I realised that meant there were only three of us left as I stood up again. Hopefully this time I would manage to stay upright for more than a few minutes.

It was darker than I had expected, lights coming down from somewhere over my shoulder, and I squinted through swirling dust to see that I was in some sort of tunnel, clear in front of me, mostly blocked with rubble behind. It formed a slope, which must have been my way down.

A shape stirred beside me, and a flash of white tank-top let me know that it was Helga. Some grey shreds of fabric still clung to her wrists and neck, the remnants of whatever she had been wearing. She rolled over onto her back, then crawled to sit up against the wall, blood at the corner of her mouth and seeping across her chest.

“Just you and me, District One?” she said. There was a crack in her voice.

“There’s at least one other person still alive,” I replied. I located my weapon from the rubble and tugged it loose, sending down another shower of small rocks. “So we’re not quite done yet.”

Stones tumbled behind me, and I turned warily, half-expecting another collapse to bury us altogether.

“In the Forty-Third Games,” continued Helga, behind me, “no-one actually left alive. Even the _winner_. The girl who won, District Five, died so shortly after the others that the hovercraft didn’t reach her in time. She’s the only post-mortem winner of the Games. Her money went to her family.”

I set my foot on one of the rocks, felt it shift, but gritted my teeth and persevered. Every place that I put my hand left a print of blood on the dusty shards of concrete, but slowly I inched up the slope again. There was a gap, higher up, and I could see a smear of blood which I didn’t remember leaving there.

“It’s all a business, after all, the Games. It might be personal to the Districts... but it isn’t to the Capitol.”

I considered telling her to shut up, because she was speaking heresy and because she was speaking truth. The only people who cared whether someone won or lost were in the Districts, because it was us winning or losing – us living or dying.

“Hello?” I stepped sideways, felt the rock almost give way, and had to cling tightly to one of the metal spurs sticking out from the slope. “Is there someone still there?”

“Ah, Fa Ping.” Kidagakash’s voice sounded weary, but there was a touch of amusement to it. “The last three turned out to be Careers anyway.”

There were white hairs stuck in the blood, and a shred of blue fabric. Was _this_ it? A rockfall? Was that going to be the deciding line between winning and losing? The year before Shang’s victory, an Arena had been flooded because it was felt that things were tarrying for too long, and there had been complaints because the boy from District Four had won almost by default. Cobra, his name had been, or something similar. He was a mentor now.

“Well, get over here and finish us off, then,” I replied. I tried to summon up something that would make it into a joke, but couldn’t quite manage it. I didn’t even know whether the Gamemakers had cameras down here, or whether they were trying to get mobile ones into place before they missed the showdown. “Can’t keep the public waiting, Kidagakash.”

A flat, sad silence was my only response for a moment, then she sighed. “My name is Kida. My name has always been Kida. _Ab extra, salus_ , child of Fa Zhou. Remember it.”

I could hear movement, shifting rocks, and then a grunt of pain. Then a cannon fired, its sound oddly muffled in the underground tunnel, and I looked round at Helga just to be sure that she was the one still alive. We looked at each other in shock for a moment, then she got to her feet, gritting her teeth and drawing the sword at her side.

“This time it really is just you and me,” she said. “Do you think that metal would be better for fencing, District One? It might make a better show than grappling like beasts.”

“My name is Fa Ping,” I said, and though it was a lie it had the anger of the truth behind it. I was not District One. Maleficent had been District One, in all of its cruelty and training and desire to win. I had just come in to keep my brother alive, in the faint hope that my father might not have to lose his son.

“Names make it personal,” said Helga. “And this shouldn’t be.”

Think like the Capitol, and perhaps I could get out of this alive. I had to admire her cynicism. Turning, I slid back down to the centre of the dark tunnel, my eyes adjusting now to the thick gloom. It was flat-floored, with an arched roof, perhaps five metres wide at ground level. The floor felt sticky, but not exactly wet, and the walls looked like dank concrete. There were a good couple of metres of space above our heads, but I couldn’t think of much use for it just at the moment.

“Nothing personal?” I offered, as I turned to face her and shifted my weapon in my hand.

Again, she smirked. The days had left her a little thinner, and the bruises on her temple and cheek made her look deadly pale, but I remembered the girl in the killer dress for her interview. “Of course. Nothing personal.”

  
  
  
  


Our words must have triggered the Gamemakers into action. Before we could even start to fight each other, a scraping sound crept down the corridors, and I groaned aloud. Usually, the last two tributes would be left to kill each other, bloodily, preferably in a manner that would be drawn-out enough for the audience to really enjoy it. Sometimes, though, there would be a muttation of particularly impressive design to be dragged out.

There had been so many mutts, over the years. Insects, snakes, slinking camouflaged creatures that lashed out with spear-tipped tongues, wolves, birds... it seemed like everything that the Gamemakers had come across, they were capable of turning into something horrific.

I was tired. I wanted to go home, go back to District One and my father, and I had thought for one moment that there was only one person in my way. Helga, already injured, had been the only person that I had needed to get past before I could get out of this place.

Get past. Of course I meant _kill_. What else was there to ever be done in the Games?

Scraping, like metal on stone, rippled down the corridor. It would have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, if I’d still had the energy for them to do so. Helga and I exchanged a glance, then looked down the tunnel stretching away from us with what I was quite sure would be very similar feelings of annoyance. Not anger, not fear; we were too tired for that, too far gone.

“Well, listen to that,” said Helga. The scraping grew louder, running over each other in little layers which I could just tell were claws on the walls. Somewhere in the distance, I thought I caught the smallest flash of movement. “Looks like it will be anonymous after all. Look behind you.”

Despite the calm way she nodded, I spun, bringing up the metal rod in my hand, only for there to be no mutt waiting behind me to pounce. My mind groped for what she could have been talking about, until I saw the hilt of a sword sticking out of the rubble, almost hidden in the shadowed corner.

I glanced back to her. “Thanks.”

She shrugged, watching as I walked over and wrenched the sword free from the rubble. It was nicked on the edges, and there was blood on the handle; I didn’t want to think where that came from. The sword must have been Rourke’s, dropped down here with the rest of us when the ground collapsed. I wondered whether all of the bodies would be recoverable by hovercraft.

“It makes things fair,” she commented wryly. She raised the sword in her own hand, resting it back against her shoulder. “Might as well give them a show to remember.”

I nodded, and huffed a laugh. “Might as well.” I tried to spin the sword round in my hands, but it was poorly balanced and I struggled to control it. With a shake of my head, I crossed back to stand parallel to Helga, our positions dividing the tunnel into three. Just far enough that we wouldn’t _accidentally_ strike each other.

A slow hiss, like escaping steam but amplified a dozen times, cut through anything else I might have been thinking, and lights started to flicker on further down the tunnel. Of course it would not take the Gamemakers long to get light and cameras down here. I blinked at the sudden brightness, but took a deep breath, shifting my stance to fighting-ready. I bounced on my toes, trying to key myself up, and wished that there was any energy left in my body to respond to it.

One last fight, I promised myself. Just one more.

Finally, framed against the light, the first of the mutts came into view. At first it was little more than a black silhouette against pale grey, low to the ground, with wide-set reptilian legs and a long, cylindrical body. The light glinted off it, flashing with red, and spines seemed to erupt from around its head. As it turned the corner, it must have caught sight of us, small lights flashing on in the roof above our heads and turning the tunnel brightly-lit.

It rose onto its hind feet, sinuous, forelimbs unfolding from its body. Dark red scales covered its snakelike body and stout legs, the thick tail that dragged along the floor to balance it. Its head looked too large for its body, all snout and teeth, steam erupting from its nostrils into the air. Thick lips pulled back from rows of teeth, flashing silver rather than just white, and its eyes were black and burningly hollow, even from where I stood.

Another rattling hiss broke forth, this time accompanied by a long, forked tongue slipping out between the mutt’s teeth. The spines all along its head and back rustled, clattering against each other, then behind it other shadows began to slink close as well.

A final moment of recklessness struck me, and I called to Helga: “District Two.”

“Yes, District One?”

“May the best woman win.”

She laughed, low and sensual, the sound hopelessly out of place in this filthy tunnel carrying these weapons and facing these creatures. “Thanks for the tip.”

I couldn’t help a grim smile as well, before I readied my sword in my hand and prepared to meet the muttations. Only Wei would get the joke, I supposed, and only my father would understand what I meant by the words. The Capitol would probably go wild at my ‘daring’, ‘chivalrous’ nature, showing right through to the end. I didn’t care.

The first of the mutts dropped back to all fours, talons clattering on the stone, and the others slunk to surround it. They flashed in different jewel-dark colours in the gloom, so many that I lost count.

Then they attacked.


	18. Part Four - The Captive

I didn’t remember the fighting, not as anything more than a blur of swords and talons and cries and roars. Snatches managed to make their way through: the hot breath of the creatures on my face; my sword snapped at the tip from the hardness of their hide; Helga dragged down by the knees, disappearing in a splatter of red but refusing to scream.

I was on my hands and knees when I realised that they were gone, and I was alone. A buzzing sound filled the air, and I thought for a moment that the first mutts were just being replaced with a second, but when I raised my head, sending the world lurching, I saw a rope ladder unfurling down through the hole in the ceiling.

A ladder. Why a ladder? I realised slowly that it was for me, that the hovercraft had come to pick me up. And I wasn’t dead. I looked to my right; Helga’s body was sprawled on the floor, one arm flung up to protect her face even in death, her thighs and stomach and forearm torn open down to bone and viscera. My stomach was too twisted to even feel sick at the sight.

Blood was dripping into one of my eyes, but I couldn’t remember where from. I tried to get to my feet, but my right leg would not obey me, and I could only crawl, dragging it behind me, to the base of the ladder. The rope was blue and clean and hurt on my hands from the moment that I touched it, but I felt dry sobs shaking me as I dragged myself upright against it, and clung to it as if the whole world was waiting at the other end.

The hovercraft. Alive.

I was the victor.

It was like reading something on far-off paper, completely unrelated to me. I rested my head against one rung as the current froze me in place, my vision blurring and greying as the hovercraft took off again. Hands caught me as I fell into the hovercraft itself, doctors in white and wearing masks, and I was lifted onto a stretcher.

Distantly, I thought that I should try to fight them off. They would realise that I was Mulan, that I was not Ping, if I did not. But the numbness in my legs was spreading upwards, and I barely felt the needle sliding beneath the skin of my arm before, with a sharp unnatural jolt, everything went black.

  
  
  
  


My eyes opened to a world without pain. The lack of it was actually a strange sensation by now, and I breathed in deeply just to see if the muscles between my ribs would complain. Even so, they did not. The room felt like a hospital, and when I looked around it confirmed my thoughts: a rail-lined bed with white sheets, white curtains surrounding me, a suspended ceiling with a single light set back into it.

It was almost a relief.

I fumbled around for a button to call a nurse. I had been in hospital before, years ago when my body could not keep up with how hard I trained, and I had ended up with a dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone. They had set the bone, put me under, and I had woken up just days later with no signs of ever having been hurt. No doubt this would be the same. This time, though, there was no button to be found, and when I tried to sit up and look around better, I realised that there were straps holding me in place.

A frown crossed my lips, and I reached with my arms to push down the sheets and pull at the widest strap, the one across my waist and hips. It looked like nothing more than white fabric, no more assuming than bandages, but I could not even fit my fingers underneath it without feeling like I was going to leave dents in my stomach from the tightness.

A door opened, and I froze at the sound, then the curtain peeled back and a figure stepped through. Wei; my heart leapt for a moment, then I saw the shadows beneath his eyes, the simplicity of his clothes. My throat seemed to close.

He reached behind my bed and pressed a button that drew me to a sitting position. I hated the feeling, the helplessness, but at least it did not send giddiness running through me.

“Welcome back, my victor,” he said, voice calm and low. He stood beside me, a tall, thin figure in yellow and red. There were still gold threads in his beard; before, he had changed the colour of them to match his robes.

“Wei,” I replied. My voice cracked, and I swallowed. “We made it.”

“You did.” His voice was low, saddened, as if he was speaking at a funeral. “However, you must realise that they know now who you are. President Yensid is angry, Mulan.”

It was the first time that he had used my real name, and for some reason that frightened me more.

“I’m sorry; I couldn’t stop what they did. A testosterone implant has been placed in your body; it is intended to start masculinising your appearance, though you are known as fairly androgynous. Your chest has also been operated on.”

My hands went instinctively to where my breasts should have been. Even before the Arena, I was flat-chested, and the training and time in there would not have helped. Now, though, I could feel that my chest had changed, flattened, the muscle stronger under my touch. I started to shake, gaze drifting to a point somewhere over Wei’s shoulder.

“The surgeons also...” I had never heard him hesitate, but a deep horror was already resonating in my bones. I thought that it could get no worse. “A hysterectomy was performed. No reconstructive genital surgery has been done, because you are only sixteen, but the Capitol wants it to be completed before you are eighteen years old.”

My arms crept further around myself, as if I was trying to hold together those parts of me that still remained. I could see nothing but white, filling my vision like thick snow, and I wished that I could curl up into a ball and return to sleep. Dream this all away.

“I’m sorry, my victor,” said Wei again. His words sounded like they were very far away, carrying along that underground tunnel full of the monsters that had been sent to kill the two Tributes who had remained.

I heard his footsteps turning to go, the rustle of a curtain, and managed to raise my head. “My brother,” I blurted. “Ping. Where is he?”

Wei had already let the curtain fall, and was only a faint silhouette beyond it. “I’m sorry,” he said, for a third time, and then I heard the door open and close. I was left alone, in the terrible silence, my eyes too dry for tears, my throat too tight to scream.

It was a relief when the IV going into the back of my hand flooded me with cold, and I slipped back into unconsciousness again.

  
  
  
  


I fought against waking up each time that followed. Food would be by my bed, and I quickly realised that I was kept awake only long enough to eat it before being allowed to fall back into the comfort of sleep. With the drugs in my arm, I didn’t even dream.

Finally, though, I woke up to find Wei standing over me, his expression unreadable, the silver and black threads in his beard matching the robes that he wore. I wondered for a moment whether my conversation with him had been a dream, but as soon as I moved my arms I could feel the strange muscles of my chest and it hit me like a blow that this was real.

“Come along, Fa Ping,” said Wei. He did not offer me his hand as I swung my legs carefully out of bed, relieved to find them able to support me. For the first time since waking up in this sterile place, I realised that my vision in both eyes was crystal-clear, and that my hands were polished smooth. Victors could not have flaws, after all; we had to be as perfect as dolls for the Capitol.

I had never asked, not even wondered, how my father had ended up with a scar on his leg still. Now, touching my smooth cheek experimentally, it finally struck me as odd.

“We have a couple of hours to ready you for your show. Come on, now; the time is shorter than it sounds.”

There were words that I wanted to say, but I wasn’t quite sure what they were. My body felt alien as I walked behind Wei, with just a dressing gown wrapped around the pyjamas that I had been wearing in the hospital, my feet still bare. My chest and arms felt as if they were more powerful, tightly corded, like I had been in the gym all day and my muscles were still burning.

Shang, Chi Fu and the other stylists were waiting at the end of the corridor for me, standing in an awkward half-circle. It took all of my composure to walk calmly towards them, especially when Chi Fu began spilling praise for me and the stylists all began talking over each other about everything that had passed in the Arena. Shang caught my eye, reached out, and patted me on the shoulder with just a slight smile and a nod. Somehow, that felt better than anything the others were doing.

The Training Centre was eerily empty; I could not help but remember that it was less than a week since all of the Tributes had been here, training and talking and _living_. The others formed a sort of guard around me as we made our way up one escalator, across the floor, and up the second to our quarters. Maleficent had avoided me while we had both been here, so at least that did not feel too different. Shang and Chi Fu peeled away, and Wei ushered the rest of us into the dressing room.

The voices of the stylists faded as they worked on my hair and skin, using subtle makeup to mould my features as Wei wanted them. It was like tinnitus, nothing more, though I grunted occasional replies to suggest that I was actually listening.

“You have been a soldier,” I heard Wei say in the distance. “You have been a knight. Now, I will make you a _youxia_.”

I had never heard of such a thing, but I did not much care. By the time that I actually looked at the clothes which I was wearing, though, I felt a sense of relief rush through me. My pants were made of some soft, dark grey fabric, loose above my leather boots. I wore a long, full-sleeved tunic over the top, white with a silver and black dragon embroidered on it, twisting up from one hip to the opposite shoulder; it looked exactly like the last mutts, though, and I could not look at that for too long. The shoulders shaped it almost like armour. My hair was tied back into a bun, showing off my sharpened features; other than that, I was left plain, with just a loose coat over the top and pendant of some white stone, carved like the token my father had given me so many days ago, hung round my neck.

It was easy, gentle. I still did not want to face the cameras, though, even with Snow White to try to guide me through. I wanted to turn to Wei and beg him for more time, but I did not get the opportunity to before Chi Fu was ushering us away, back through the coolly quiet building to the area beneath the stage.

The crowd above me was already a rush of noise, and I started to tremble even as I stood on the metal plate. Chi Fu, Wei and my stylists disappeared, and I thought myself alone for a moment until movement caught my attention, and I turned to find Shang almost at my shoulder.

“You’ve done well,” he said quietly. I had never heard him doing much other than giving orders to people, and even now his expression was not soft, but he put his hand on my shoulder and rested it there. I wasn’t even sure if he knew who I really was. “You can go home soon.”

Fa Mulan would never go home, and I did not even know where Fa Ping was. But I could see that it had been difficult for him to find the words, and I reached up to squeeze his hand tightly.

“This is just... extra,” he said, and for a moment I was more struck by the pause until I caught the inflection he put on that last word. _Extra_. I remembered Kidag- no, Kida, her last whispered words from beyond the bloodied rubble. My heart started to pound in my chest, and I looked in his gaze for a sign that anything more had been meant by it, but there was nothing there.

Of course, there were cameras watching us.

His hand slid from under mine. “It’ll be done soon,” he said, and began to walk away. My mind stuttered through a scream, and I wanted to grab him back and ask what he meant, but my feet remained glued to the metal circle on which I stood as if there was a mine placed beneath this one, as well. A roar from the crowd above me echoed down, and I flinched away, although I knew that it was just that my prep team would be being introduced. I had never even bothered to listen out for their names: they remained red tattoos, gold skin and shiny face. I had enough of myself left to hope that they would not be punished for what I did, to hope that Wei would be pardoned, to hope that Shang was never told.

The crowd screamed for Wei, stomping and shrieking, and I supposed that there must have been flowers and jewels raining down on him from the crowds. Wei had been loved for so many years that he seemed to be part of the Games for most of us still young enough to run the risk of being Tributes; surely, _surely_ , they would not harm him. The noise goes on for minutes, and lulls marginally before bursting upwards again for Chi Fu. What Chi Fu had actually done, I wasn’t too sure, but I supposed that I should thank him for the silver parachutes that had bought in what I so desperately needed. My fingers drifted upwards to my cheek again, as if checking that it was still there.

A breath of pause, and then Shang. The announcers had managed to perfect their timing years ago, knowing when to call people so that the crowd would be left bursting with anticipation and excitement all the way through. It made it seem to go faster, as well, which I supposed was a relief for those back home.

Baba had always hated watching this part the most. I hoped that, at least tonight, it would be a relief for him to see me on the stage, alive and whole. Well, in some ways, at least.

Then the longest pause yet came, allowing the crowd to dull down to complete silence, before I heard my name – my brother’s name, now my name; I whispered an apology to Ping for not knowing what he had done to him and thought that I might cry, but somehow could not – boomed out over the loudspeakers, and a circle of light opened above me as the floor began to move. Like entering the Arena all over again, I was offered up to them, and in the pit of my stomach I felt like nothing more than a sacrifice.


	19. Chapter 19

The lights blinded me, and the noise hit me like a solid wall, leaving me blinking and trying not to sway in my spot. From somewhere in the blur of lights and colours, I managed to catch sight of Snow White, wafting across to me in blue and yellow clothes that fluttered around her, silver glitter all around her. I gathered myself and reached out to take the hand that she offered me, bending at the waist to kiss it. The crowd screamed their approval, making it impossible to hear the words: “My lady,” that I added.

Snow White pretended to look faint, throwing a wink to the camera, and I moved as if to cradle her. It was easier, to play along like this. She allowed me to lead her over to her chair and settle her down into it, before taking my own seat in the victor’s chair. It was all gilt handles and plush surfaces, and felt far too much like a throne to be comfortable.

“So, my Prince, you have returned to me,” she said, folding her hands over her chest. The audience laughed appreciatively.

I tilted my head towards her fondly. “As if I could have stayed away.”

We joked for a couple of minutes, and part way through I rose to my feet and dragged my chair closer to hers, so that I could reach out and rest my hand on hers. The audience barely seemed to stop long enough for us to speak to each other.

Snow White finally managed to wrestle the conversation round to the matter of the three-hour show that will fill in everything else that happened in the last few days. Although I had been there for most of the fighting, there were still questions that lingered with me. The lights dimmed, the Seal lit up the screens, and I wrapped my hands around the arms of my chair as if to pin myself in place to watch it.

The three hours were always meant to tell a story, but I did not expect what this one would be. This time, the Gamemakers had decided to pit Fa Ping against Kidakagash Nedakh, in a three-hour fight for their survival.

We were treated as if we were the two forerunners from the beginning, when I knew that the other tributes had not reckoned me for much before I scored my ten. Kida had scored eleven. By then, though, it had been too late for Rourke or the others to react to me, and we were flung into the Arena in a flurry of action.

The brief, fierce Bloodbath is split between Kida’s fight and the kills going on around her. The first kill was mine, Amelia with her skull cracking beneath the blow; Kocoum came next, killed by the girl from Eight, Jasmine, who snatched the bag from his hands and fled before the cannon had even fired. Maleficent killed Aladdin, throwing a knife into his chest to stop him in his tracks before closing the distance and cutting open his throat in a crimson slash. The camera lingered on a close-up of the wound before he slumped to the ground.

The deaths were cut through with shots of Kida, fighting first Helga and then Rourke, standing in the centre of the Cornucopia with her hair flashing white against the darkness. Shan Yu was kept away from the fight just long enough to kill Megara from District Five, crushing her head with repeated blows, before he too joined them. Then it was as I remembered: the Career pack ringed around Kida, closing in on her, my stepping in to kill Eric and the pack scattering instead.

The camera panned out dramatically as we shook hands, standing on the pile of objects over which we now ruled.

Most of the rest, I already knew. Jasmine was killed the first day, by the Careers who took the pack she had managed to take from the Bloodbath. That was treated as an aside to the work that the rest of us did by the Cornucopia, though, clearing space and setting the mines, destroying the floor of the stadium. The explosion could be seen all the way across the Arena, the dust clouds rolling out, and the screen cut to the Careers as they looked round in shock.

As the night closed around us, the Careers killed Jim as well, once again taking his supplies. I could almost feel that first evening taking over me again, as if I was living the night rather than watching it on the wide screen. My hands tightened on the arms of the chair until the carvings dug into my skin, reminding me of where I was.

When the water began to flow, the Careers had made their way to the edge of the Arena to investigate, and the others still alive peeked round or kept huddled in their hiding place. Woody and Jessie, camped out in one of the destroyed buildings, had managed to light a fire and erect a sort of screen to keep it hidden, and were sharing their food and gentle words. Tarzan had climbed high above the Arena on a twisted metal thing that might once have been a pylon, and was crouched watching over us like a bird. I hadn’t realised at the time that he could see our group as we scrambled desperately out of the culvert as the water deepened.

A shocked, delighted cry went through the audience when I saved Kida’s life. Again, I wondered why I had done it. They cut most of our argument, and made it look like we had parted ways amicably.

Most of the rest, I already knew. I killed Maleficent, wounded Hayabusa, and retreated to the stadium. The next day dawned. Woody and Jessie were killed by Rourke and Helga, Rapunzel died in my arms, and the camera lingered on my expression as she did so. I hadn’t realised how pained I had looked. What I had not seen was Kida, leading her group around the Arena, keeping away from any of the other Tributes, dividing up their food, and doing their own catching with hooks that Kida made from bits of broken metal, tied up with her own hair. They were classic ‘defensive’ Tributes, in my father’s words, surviving rather than killing. But it was working.

Days three and four passed, and the show used the clips of it to build tension for the oncoming storm. I knew what was coming, and it was all that I could do not to shake as the rain began to fall. Tarzan died first, exposed to the rain, skin sloughing from his bones. It made me feel sicker to watch it all over again. Then Hayabusa, as I had seen.

Then the fights returned, and with it the Gamemakers’ flare for drama. Suddenly the world shrunk away again, and I struggled to recognise myself as the figure on the screen, killing first Shan Yu and then Hercules, creeping away to tend to my own injuries. Then Pocahontas’s death came, and I hated Rourke all over again.

The final day. It was so close to the real time that it ached, but I had not realised until that moment that the Games had only lasted for six days. Some in the past had gone on for eight weeks or so, especially since the backlash to the flooded Arena that had made it less likely for the Gamemakers to step in and cut things short. The sun rose, the Feast was delivered, and then the deaths poured in one after another. Quasimodo. Rourke. I did not even know why the camera lingered on me, watching the flicker of blue fabric tied to a metal pole not all that far away from me, in the seconds before the final explosion collapsed the ground.

They did not have shots of the deaths of Esmerelda, Milo, Cinderella, or Kida. That actually surprised me. The closest thing that they had was me, looking through the rubble, and then slowly backing away as Kida’s voice stopped. _My name has always been Kida... remember it_. They had cut some of her words. But then they showed the final battle, Helga fighting even as she was torn apart, and were kind enough to cut the part where I had to crawl to the ladder before I could stand against it. The last shot was me, holding my sword high and facing one of the mutts, ferocity in my face and blood drenching me, before the image faded to black.

  
  
  
  


I thought that the crowd would explode with applause. My face reappeared on the screen, blank with shock in a way that might almost pass for awe, as the anthem played loud enough to shake my bones. I got to my feet as a spotlight beamed down on President Yen Sid, his long grey beard curled in front of his embroidered blue clothes, his eyes narrow and smile dangerous as he came towards me.

He placed the crown on my head, but it felt painfully heavy, tiny spikes driving into my skin. I tried to smile graciously, to thank him though the words were once again drowned on my lips.

In my role of the youxia, I made my way through the rest of the night, so hungry that my stomach did not seem to fill no matter how much food I shovelled away at the victory feast. I drank wine, which I had never had before, and it helped me to stay in character until midnight struck and I was finally allowed to flee, sinking to my knees in the shower whilst I was still clothed.

The Games were supposed to be over. I just wanted to go home, go to my father, but I had the feeling that something was being dangled just out of my reach and it angered and frightened me in either measure. The hot water of the shower made it hard to struggle out of my clothes, but it helped to clear the fog in my mind. Sadly, there was only blankness in its place, until I slept, when Kida’s piercing blue eyes stared at me through the darkness.

_Ab extra salus, child of Fa Zhou._

The words ricocheted and echoed around my mind until it was like a storm in my head. Explosions and spears and screaming bloody skulls surrounded me, biting me, stripping the skin from my face, and still the voice of the She-Devil of District Four grew louder and louder in my head until I awoke with a scream.

“-salus!”

I didn’t even know the word. Shaking, I gasped for breath, waiting for the silhouettes in the dark room to become shapes. A bed, furniture, the real world rather than the Arena into which I had been flung. Sweat streamed down my forehead and stuck my pyjamas to my skin. Wrapping the top sheet around myself, I retreated to the head of the bed and nestled among the pillows, watching the windows get slowly lighter as the sun rose and the light creeping through changed from artificial to natural.

Throughout the second interview, all that I could think about was how much I wanted to go home. I did my best to stay light and talk well, but I found myself slipping back to quietness. Humble, Wei would probably want to call it. I certainly didn’t want to gloat.

“How does it feel to have won the 74th Hunger Games?” Snow White asked me, her smile always the same to keep the silver flakes on her face perfectly shaped.

“Such... an honour,” I managed. The audience sighed; women swooned; Snow White fluttered at me again. “I’m so glad to be coming back. It was over so much more quickly than I had thought... it’s amazing that so much can happen in such a short space of time.”

President Yensid had surely not looked at other victors like that. I remembered seeing him on the screen, smiling like a kindly old grandfather. They could not have shown the smile that he gave me to the whole country.

“And such a year! How did it feel, to know that Kidakagash Nedakh would be going into the Arena as well?”

I had seen that they had displayed us as enemies.

“I could never have expected to go up against Kida Nedakh,” I replied. Her final words, her name, clung to me. If all that I had ever done for her was pull her from the water and then remember her name, then perhaps that would be enough. “This whole Games has been a real experience. She was such a powerful figure.”

“And leaving that last mine until the end,” added Snow White. She reached over to rest her hand on my arm, but even as I kept smiling I felt my eyes go blank. “Such a brave move! Tell me, what inspired you to do that?”

“I... I don’t know.”

I didn’t do it. I didn’t know who, or what, triggered that final mine to go off. I had not even realised until that moment that it _was_ a mine, although then it made perfect sense.

“Sometimes it’s hard to plan things, you know?” I added, trying to recover. victors came with a capital letter, with responsibilities as well as their riches. As soon as someone was reaped, they belonged to the Capitol for the rest of their lives, whether that was days or decades. “Things change so quickly. I’ve always been a fan of thinking on my feet. This was... no different.”

Her hand squeezed my wrist tightly. “And eleven kills as a result! The highest total in any Games other than the second Quarter Quell!” The astonishment must have been visible on my face as she gave a delighted gasp and a girlish laugh, one hand going to cover her mouth delicately. “You didn’t know? Well, it must have gone so quickly. But yes, eleven kills, including the ones from the explosion! That makes you a new record-holder!”

The boy on the screen looked pleased, and thanked Snow White for letting him know, and I felt more like I was watching him than like I was actually talking myself. They talked for a while longer about the deaths that he had caused as if it was no more important than the weather, and then Snow White signed off – though not before I had reached over gallantly to kiss her hand once again.

“Oh, you are such a _darling_!” she declared after the cameras were turned off, cupping my cheeks in her hands. Her head barely came above my shoulders. “I can hardly _wait_ to do the interviews with you next year.”

She kissed me on the cheek in a whirl of flowery scent, then vanished away, chattering to the cameramen. A hand came to rest in the small of my back, and I whipped round, ready to punch the person who put it there, until I realised that it was Shang. The dark circles under his eyes, barely visible beneath the makeup, could have been my imagination. I hoped that they were, because I wasn’t sure why they would be there. “Come on,” he said softly. “You can go home now.”

The train journey back to District One wouldn’t be long; if I was lucky, I would be there before midnight, and could spend the night with my family. Tomorrow, I would be expected to move into the new house that they would have built in the Victors’ Village – our original twelve houses had filled up long ago – but perhaps, just for tonight, I would sleep in my own bed again.

I tried not to look at the flashing cameras and waving Capitol fans that I had accumulated as I was settled into a tint-windowed car and driven back to the station. Chi Fu sat and fussed opposite me, and I was surprised again at how comforting a presence Shang was, sitting beside me. I almost wanted to cling to him, but fiercely pushed the thought aside. At the station, I finally got the chance to say goodbye, although the prep team were nervous about being seen anywhere near me still, and I had to be content with waving.

When it came to Wei, he smiled, and his eyes were the oldest that I had ever seen them. How old was he, really? Sixty, seventy? My father had been the last Tribute that he had _not_ been the stylist for. Impulsively, I reached out and hugged him, and after a moment’s pause I felt his arms fold around me in return.

“Stay safe, my victor,” he murmured in my ear. “Stay strong.”

A lump rose in my throat, but the last few days it had been as if I was not even able to cry any more. I released him, stepped back to wave one last time at the crowds, then entered the train and fled to my room to hide.

After a few hours, there was a knock at my door, but all that I did was glare at it. There was no lock, and it surprised me when nobody entered. Finally, unfolding myself from the ball I had curled into, I crossed to the door and pulled it open, a glower already on my face. There was nobody outside, though, just a tray left on the floor, almost overflowing with food and two large bottles of fruit juice.

My stomach still felt hollow, as if nothing could fill it, but I pulled the tray into the room and sat with my back against the door to eat it. We ate well in District One, I knew, compared to some of the other districts: fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, occasional candies and sugared treats. But our food was nowhere near as elaborate as Capitol food, did not have the bright colours and tongue-twisting flavours that were strange and pleasurable at the same time, and I had genuinely enjoyed some of the things that I had eaten before the Games had started. Now I just ate, and didn’t think about what was passing my lips.

The train would be taking the direct route back, I knew, and I watched the sky darken outside with a twist of fear and hope in my gut. The waning moon flickered into view, behind trees passing so quickly that they were a blur, and I wrapped my arms around my knees because wrapping them across my chest only reminded me how wrong it felt.

Finally, the train started to slow. This time, when there was a knock at the door, I stood up and opened it. It was Shang, dressed down and with the shadows under his eyes clearly visible now. “We’ll be at the station soon,” he said.

“One minute,” I replied, and crossed to the washbasin to splash cold water over my face. It didn’t do much to help, but it felt like a good gesture anyway. Steeling myself, I followed Shang through the train, feeling it slow down, grateful that there should not be any cheering crowds awaiting me here. Some cameras, perhaps, to see me reunited with my family and capture the moment on camera for interviews later in the year, but nothing like the chaos that there had been in the Capitol.

Finally, the train stopped, and my heart seemed to fill my throat. I reached up to touch the dragon pendant hanging round my neck, struggling not to wrap my hand around it and cling to it like a safety rope. Chi Fu stepped aside and ushered me up to the door first.

I was home.


	20. Chapter 20

The train doors opened far too slowly, my body was shaking, but it didn’t matter. In a matter of heartbeats I had run the length of the platform and flung my arms around my father, feeling his arms wrap tightly around me in return. I squeezed my eyes shut, held on, and tried to ride out the waves that threatened to capsize me.

“My child,” he whispered in my ear. I thought that I might cry, but still tears would not come. “You came back to me. You came back.”

“I’m here, Baba.” My voice thickened; it had seemed lower these past few days, but I had put that down to a lack of use. His hold on me grew looser, and though I did not want to let go, I allowed him to step away.

Somehow, I knew that my relief would only last as long as I kept looking at him. Even if the lines on his forehead seemed a little deeper, even if his beard seemed a little greyer, it was surely because I had been around the strange doll-like features of the Capitol for too long. I had always said that he and I could take on the world.

Then he stepped aside, and my delusion crashed down.

My grandmother was not here. My mother looked at me with vacant eyes and a plastic smile. And a girl wearing my clothes stood beside her, looking almost like me but not quite: prettier, more feminine, larger-eyed and softer-lipped. She looked like I might have done, if I stopped training and started using makeup, if somebody else used my body for a while.

The girl ran over, eyes bright and teary, and threw her arms around my shoulders to hold me close. She smelt wrong, but of my home as well. I put my hands on her back to steady us, hoping that my look of horror was lost in her hair.

“Mulan?” I couldn’t help it being a question.

She laughed. “Of _course_ , Ping. Look, they even made me wear a dress to welcome you back.”

Her voice sounded almost like mine, but the words were wrong. Releasing me, she stepped back, but grabbed hold of my hand and held tightly to it. I looked down at our fingers clasped together, and was shocked back in time.

I had held Ping’s hand like this when we had walked to the Reaping.

The girl who had answered to my name led me by the hand out of the station, speaking just once to tell me how proud she was, and to squeeze my hand. The cameramen seemed to lose interest after the first reunion, and we were allowed to leave quietly to the road back to the Victors’ Village.

It was fall, though I had honestly forgotten that. The leaves were turning, starting to be shed, and turning to reddish-brown mush at the roots of the trees. Soon the colours of the furs that some of the families collected would be starting to change, as well. I allowed the girl to lead me by the hand, though I kept looking over my shoulder to my parents. My father had taken my mother’s arm, seeming to lead her even though he still had his cane in his other hand. I tried, and failed, to catch his eye.

The new house – it was difficult to think of it as mine – had been built close to my father’s. It was the same shining white as the others, though the plants and trees outside looked fresher, the edges of the lawn sharper. I refused to be led in that direction, and slipped my hand out of the girl’s. She gave me a look that was mostly hurt, and partly fear. It sent shivers down my spine.

It was only when I reached our front door that I realised that I no longer had the keys for it. I tucked my hands under my armpits, hunching my shoulders and turning my face away from the outside world, whilst I waited for my parents to catch up. Even with his scars, my father had walked quickly before. It seemed to take a long time for him to catch up this time.

My mother slipped inside without saying a word, and immediately went upstairs. The girl in my clothes, with one glance my way that did not quite disguise the fear in her eyes, fled as well. My father remained standing behind me, close enough that I could feel his presence.

“What happened?” I said, voice growing husky.

He gently closed the door again. “Come to the arbour.”

It would have been quicker to walk through the house to the rear garden and the shrine, but everything felt wrong and it was easier to be outside. At least, I could hope, the air itself had not changed. I walked at my father’s side round the side of the house, passing windows with drawn curtains, and we entered the garden through the side gate.

Our garden was tranquil, quiet. Master He came up three times a week to tend to the flowers, clear stray leaves from the lawns and the stream, and clean the outside of our family shrine that nestled beneath the trees. Outside the shrine, we had to call it an arbour, in case a camera or microphone from the Capitol was anywhere nearby. My father cleaned the inside himself, to be as sure as he could be that there were no such devices there.

We sat on the steps and looked out over the sweep of lawn, the peach trees with a few leaves still remaining, the rippling artificial stream. When the weather had been good, I had persuaded Ping to train out here, just sparring and running, keeping me company.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was only the second thing that I had said to him since the cameras turned off. It wasn’t enough. My lips started to tremble, and I felt almost as if I might cry, but again there was nothing but burning dryness in my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Baba.”

One of his hands closed fiercely over mine, and when I looked round he was staring at me, intensely, eyes wet. “Never apologise to me for being brave, my child. You have done one of the courageous things that I have ever seen, and you are still here...”

His voice cracked, and his hand shifted on mine as if confirming that it was real, that I was not some figment of his imagination. I didn’t even know what to do, but wrapped my other hand around his as well, as if just holding on would be enough.

“You are still here,” he repeated, nodding as if composing himself. He blinked a few times. “You... they cannot take away. They cannot break. After all that they have taught you, you still know to do the right thing, even if it is the hard thing.”

Had it been right? All that I had been thinking of was keeping Ping alive, of keeping him safe. The same thing that I had done when we were children, and the older Careers would try and pick on us but I would fight them off; the same thing that I had done in school, when I would take the blame for fights that he had got drawn into. Had it ever been right, that I had lived for both of us?

I could barely think those thoughts, let alone speak them. “Is Grandmother well?” I said, hesitantly. My thumb stroked gently over the back of my father’s wrist, out of time with my words.

He swallowed. “She is in the hospital. I hope that she will be well again soon. There seems to be some sort of ‘influenza’ going around at the moment, affecting mostly... those more senior in years.”

It was as if somebody else was standing at my shoulder, taking some message from the words which I could not comprehend. “Please, let me know–”

“She will be well again soon,” repeated my father, his whole body stiffening for a moment, his voice turning to the harsh command which I had not heard in years. My mother had been disappointed with me far more often than my father had, and I had rarely clashed with him. “And your mother will stop having to take medication for her head pains, and I...”

His gaze turned away from me, into the middle distance over my shoulder, and I looked over his face again. It was not my imagination; he did look older, more weary, than the last time that I had seen him. Less than two weeks. I had seen old pictures of him – hidden away in albums that I was probably not supposed to find – where he had worn the same haunted look. From the dates on them, they had been in the months after he had won in his Games.

“And I will still have you,” he finally finished, looking back to me again. His hand slipped out from between mine and rose to touch my cheek gently. “Things will be better soon, I promise. Finally, we will have survivors of the Hunger Games.”

  
  
  
  


Nobody would tell me any more. Days passed, and I felt as if I was cut out of my own world, dropped in to some sort of parallel universe where different people had the same names. On my first day, I slept until well past noon, and when I crawled out of bed spent a long time sitting under the shower. Just having clean water and fresh clothes was strange now, and it wasn’t until a stabbing pain in my stomach reminded me that I should eat that I made myself go downstairs.

Nobody else was around. The girl was nowhere to be seen, the door to my parents’ room was closed, and though I could hear my father moving around in his study I could not bring myself to disturb him. I returned to my room, sat on the bed and watched a man far too young to be Master He move around the garden, raking up leaves as he went. Master He was eighty-four years old, a decade older than even my Grandmother, with about three teeth and a face full of wrinkles, but he had still been healthy and hale enough to keep several of the gardens in the Victors’ Village. Perhaps he, too, had this ‘influenza’.

I let myself fall asleep to escape the fear. I had hoped that the Games would have ended by now.

On the second day, I was moved into ‘my’ house. Normally, victors shared with their families, but as my father already had a house there was no call to. It was too large, too empty, and I wandered from room to room looking at furniture and decorations and wondering how it managed to reek of the Capitol without being a part of it. There was something artificially shining, disturbingly attractive, about everything. Some people came from the town to help move my things, and it was not until they were doing so that I realised some of my clothes, my books, my childhood belongings were missing. My underwear had been replaced with boy’s, the bras that my mother had optimistically bought me were gone, and the unofficial books about the Games which were passed among Careers had vanished. The last, I hoped, would at least go to more Tributes, to give them more of a chance in the next few years.

Hopefully Shang would want to mentor the male tributes for a few years longer. Even as the most successful District of recent years, more likely than not I would be watching children go to their death, no matter how hard I fought to find sponsors to save them. _Children_. Next year, it was likely that a Career would volunteer again. They would be a year older than me. But I certainly did not feel like a child.

I lost the next three days. They must have happened: I must have slept and eaten and dressed and done something other than lie on my bed and watch the hands on my clock tick round. I just could not remember what they were. I must have had thoughts that were not about the deaths that had happened or that would take place in years to come, but I could not remember them. And I must have had dreams that did not fill in the details of those last minutes in the Arena with shot of Kida’s broken, mangled body, but perhaps they were just lost beneath my screams.

In the middle of the sixth day, it felt as if I woke up. Standing on the doorstep, a thick sandwich in one hand, with the door open and the girl in my best dress standing in front of me, I woke up to find fury blasting through my veins, and everything snapping into crystal clarity.

I grabbed the girl by the collar, dragged her inside and slammed the door behind us. Before she could even scream, I had her against the wall, one hand over her throat, the other pinning her arm with the wrist twisted round on itself so that her skin turned white. Her eyes went so wide that I could see white all the way around her iris, her breathing fast and shallow. If anyone had attacked me, even when I was young, I would have fought them for it. Even Ping would have struggled. This girl was almost too scared to breathe.

“Who are you.”

The words came out flat, more an accusation then a question. When I dug the blade of my hand into the bottom of her chin, she gave a whimper. “My name is Fa Mulan.”

“ _I_ am Fa Mulan,” I snarled. For years I might have answered to Ping’s name, and he to mine, but _we_ knew that we were doing it. It was our game, our secret, blurring our identities a little but remaining two separate people knowing who we were. “Who are you?”

I was pinning her body to the wall with my own, one leg pressing over hers so that she could not move. With anyone my physical equal, I would not have been able to do it.

“My name is Fa Mulan,” she repeated. She tried to squirm in my grasp, but I only pressed the inside of her wrist tighter against the wall until she cried out. “My name is Fa Mulan!”

“ _That is not your name_ ,” I said, half-shouted, each word a punch that made her cringe against the wall. Tears filled her eyes. Now that I was this close, I could see a faint line beneath her ear, not quite a scar but a place where a scar might have been, two pieces of flesh meeting where they were not supposed to. “That name is _mine_ and you will not take it from me. What. Is. Your. Name?”

“If it is not Mulan, then I do not know!” she cried. Her words rocked me back on my heels slightly, and I loosened the twist of her arm, let my hand slide down her throat. Her lips trembled, and tears started to bead in her eyes as she looked at me, so close that we could barely focus on each other. “They told me that my name was Mulan, and it is all I know... please, please,” the tears started to fall, her eyes and her nose to redden. Black – make-up – tinged her tears. “I don’t know any other name.”

Time ticked by as I took four slow breaths, holding each one before letting it out again. The girl’s nose began to get runny, and she hiccoughed back a sob, but she held still in my grip. “What happened?”

“I woke up. They... doctors... told me that I was Fa Mulan. They told me all about my old life. How I was the daughter of Fa Zhou, victor of the second Quarter Quell on behalf of District One. Where I went to school, where I went afterwards each day for training, where my house was. How my brother Ping had been Reaped for the Games, I thought you were my brother, I thought you were Ping, Idon’tunderstand-”

She began sobbing in earnest then, but I let her go, stepping back a pace. The girl seemed to crumple in on herself, burying her face in her hands and squeezing her elbows together as if she might hide behind her arms, shoulders hunching. I listened to her sob, almost rhythmically, trying to suppress the fierce shaking that was starting in my chest, working its way out across my body. I had thought that this girl was an actress, or a Capitol spy. Now I did not know what she was.

Slowly, the girl slid down to the floor, folding at the knees and curling into the foetal position. I took another step back, felt myself sway, and caught at the wall for support. It hit me like a wave: my mother’s morphling-glazed eyes, my father locked away in his study, my grandmother who had not been in hospital even to give birth, now there for some sickness that seemed limited to those over sixty years of age. This girl, confused, crying on my floor, still asking between sobs whether I was her brother or not.

Snow White had credited me with eleven victims. Here, I was looking at more.

My mother had never wanted us to train for the Games. I remembered arguments, when I was younger, although I did not understand them for many years more. Father had seen it as a necessary evil – the children of victors were reaped more often than chance would allow, and his voice had broken as he said that he wanted us alive. Mother had replied that if we trained, we would be Careers, and we would have no choice but to go in – and that the Gamemakers would have loved to put us in the same year.

When I was twelve years old, I promised myself that if Ping and I were put in the same Arena, I would protect him and kill everyone else, before dying myself. I would fight to make him the victor.

Perhaps I should have volunteered instead of Maleficent, and followed my original plan. Perhaps Ping would be here now, and I would be honoured with a plaque in the cemetery where children who take part in the Games are immortalised, and things would be as they were meant to be.

But perhaps I was too determined a survivor.

I scooped up the girl, putting my hands beneath her arms and pulling her back to her feet. Still, she did not fight me, even as I led her through the hallway and into the kitchen, putting her on to a chair and placing a glass of water in front of her. My movements were mechanical again, as automatic as they had been in the last three days, but this time I was watching myself and waiting for my moves, knowing what I planned. She ignored the water, but accepted the tissues that I handed her, clutching them to her eyes and nose in a damp mess. I supposed that it was a start.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “If your name is Mulan, then I will call you Mulan. But I need... I need you to tell me what has happened here, while I have been gone.”


	21. Chapter 21

She spoke to me like a child, head bowed, sniffling her way through her sentences. And it made me feel old. There was nothing in her memory before waking up in a hospital bed, being told that her name was Fa Mulan, being given details of my life and being told that they were hers. It had all felt so right, she said, so real. She remembered sitting with my father and watching the Games, remembered training, remembered how my mother had tutted and disapproved of getting a dog, let alone calling it Little Brother, and Grandmother had winked at me behind my mother’s back.

I didn’t know how the Capitol had done it. I didn’t even pretend to understand half of the things that they were capable of there, I could guess why, though: to frighten me, to frighten my parents, and to make it easier to carry out their charade.

So she had my memories. But it hadn’t made her like me, hadn’t managed to make her into the same person. She was too frightened, for a start, and when I had attacked her she had allowed herself to be overcome. She had never trained.

She did, however, tell me what my father could – or would – not. That my mother had started taking small doses of morphling to help her sleep, and curb the terrible headaches that had started seemingly from the moment I was Reaped, but that they had rapidly consumed her instead. That a team of doctors had been sent round to give everyone inoculations against the ‘influenza’, only for my grandmother – and most of the oldest people in the town or the Village – to fall ill within forty-eight hours. That there had been visits in the middle of the night, men in suits or uniforms wanting to talk to my father.

“Did you hear what they said?” I pressed, leaning towards her. She shied away from my hand as it slid across the table, shaking her head.

“I don’t know. Something about Atlantis, about what it was. Unrest in District Four. Something about extras. I didn’t understand.”

My throat suddenly went dry. Kida’s last words, sighed to me from beneath a pile of rubble. Shang, just before I went on stage. My father, talking about survivors as he had not done in all of his life. Atlantis.

Smaller things, things that had seemed stupid at the time, began to join them in my head. Chi Fu had complained, at the victory banquet, about how there was no fish to be had, until he had seemed to catch himself and fall silent. Kida had fought all of her life to take part in the Games when she had every right to hate them. In the weeks before the Games, there had been a major recruitment drive for Peacekeepers, something that only occasionally happened outside District Two.

“Rebellion...” I said. It felt strange on my lips, foreign and dangerous and forbidden, because this time it did not mean the Dark Days. This time, it meant all of the fragments of hate that were scattered across Panem were starting to form into a whole.

A knock sounded at my door.

I remembered, too late, the ever-present microphones.

  
  
  
  


If I did not answer the door, whoever was there would enter anyway, and then I would not be on the doorstep with some chance of people in the other houses seeing me. Muttering something at the girl that might was meant to tell her to stay still, hoping that she would understand, I got to my feet and made my way to the front door. My hand twitched for a weapon as I neared it, but there was nothing, not even a vase that was not made of some highly-breakable material.

No choice. I put on my best greeting smile and opened the door. I was surprised – but rather relieved – to find Chi Fu on the doorstep, fidgeting and nervous, fussing with some printed transcript that he held in his hands. Two Peacekeepers stood behind him, stun batons at their hips but otherwise not visibly armed.

He looked at me, clearly waiting for an invitation inside. I stood squarely in the middle of the doorway and folded my arms over my chest, tilting my chin up. With an irritated look, Chi Fu snapped the transcript flat and looked over it once again.

“Due to the remarkable nature of your success in the 74th Hunger Games,” he read, somehow injecting derision into the words, “it has been requested that you give extra interviews this year, with your father. You are to return to the Capitol, and the interviews will be practiced and broadcast tomorrow.” Finally, he looked up to meet my eyes. “You have two hours.”

I couldn’t speak. I could barely _breathe_. One of the Peacekeepers peeled off from behind him to the end of the driveway, where a sleek black car sat waiting. I hadn’t even looked that far. The door opened and Wei folded out, regal in black and royal blue, sweeping towards me while the rest of the prep team scurried to keep up with him.

All that I wanted to do was fold against the door and weep. Or possibly punch a wall until my knuckles bled.

But, like the victor I was, like the possession of the Capitol that I was, I stepped aside to let back in the people who were to prepare me for whatever the Capitol had planned.

  
  
  
  


Extra interviews were strange, but any other year I would have held on to the thought that stranger things had happened. When my father was invited to board the train with me, I felt the first rush of fear, but we both knew that nothing was ever an _invitation_ when it came from the Capitol. Wei greeted my father cordially, like an old friend, and the prep team were given half an hour with him as well. He re-emerged in a darker version of my grey tunic, the dragon design made more discreet in colour on his shoulder.

I was handed a speech to do before the camera, allowing the occasional pause for my father to interject and say how proud he was of his son. The reporter and the camera crews looked teary-eyed and proud at how choked-up he sounded.

I wondered where his son was. Whether I had caused my brother’s death anyway, in that stupid instinctive move made to save it.

We were hustled off to the station, served a meal that barely managed to interest me, and then escorted to our rooms for the night. I heard the door lock behind me, and spun on the spot, but no amount of rattling or cursing or requesting for it to be opened gained any response. Perhaps there was not even anyone outside.

I paced the room for what seemed like hours, until tiredness got the better of me and I slumped down, head going into my hands, on the edge of the bed. I had never gone looking for any of this. Had barely been _looking_ for anything, because looking was a word that suggested far more thought about things than I ever gave them.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, I must have fallen asleep, but I woke up curled on the floor to a hammering on the door. The blinds on my windows were drawn, but bright light crept around them, and I groaned as I unfolded myself from the floor.

“I’m up,” I croaked, staggering to my feet. It was only then that I heard the click of the door unlocking, and Chi Fu stepped in to hand me a pile of clothes. He wrinkled his nose at my state – crumpled clothes, messy hair, the side of my face marked with the creases of my shirt – but said nothing. I caught a glimpse of a Peacekeeper outside the door as he left again, and I took it as read that I was supposed to wear the clothes that I had been given.

They were identical to the previous day’s, although the fabric felt slightly different. Lighter, slicker, something that I couldn’t really put my finger on. I washed my face, brushed my hair and changed, hoping that there would not be crowds on the platform that I would be expected to wave at again. There were shadows under my eyes, and before I could even ask questions – even about breakfast – I was ushered down the train and away.

The platform was empty. No cameras, no crowds. It must have been deliberately closed off. A hand came down, hard, on my shoulder, and I spun to slap it away. The Peacemaker whose arm I struck scowled at me, but before he could say anything my father appeared between us.

“It’s okay. Stand down.”

My father spoke quietly, but apparently even here the words were enough. The Peacekeeper gave an inclination of his head and stepped back, and my father turned to me with a tired smile.

“Thank you,” I said. His hand brushed against my cheek gently in response, then Chi Fu approached, still flustered and glancing around all the time.

“Come along, then. A car is waiting outside.”

He looked different than he had before I went in to the Arena, I realised distantly: more drawn, his clothes hanging differently on his frame. Looser. Every part of the world had seemed different when I exited the Arena than it had when I had gone in, but now I was wondering whether parts of it really were different.

I wished for a hand to take hold of as I left, even if it would have been under the guise of giving comfort rather than looking for it. Our footsteps echoed down the corridor, the harsh clack of the Peacekeepers’ boots, the tapping of my father’s cane. The cars waiting, right outside the door, were plain black with tinted windows, no banners or balloons like there had been on the cars sent to carry the Tributes around just days ago. Trying to think back to it felt like trying to remember a past life.

“Hey!” I protested as my father was led to one car and I to another, steered apart by Peacekeepers that slipped between us. “No, let me-”

A gun appeared in front of me, and my mouth went dry. It took me a moment longer to look beyond the gun itself to the Peacekeeper holding it, a stern woman with lines around her steely eyes and lips set into a grim line. “Get into your car,” she said, in clipped District Two tones. When she gestured towards it with her weapon, I saw the stripes on her shoulder that meant she was an officer, and backed off a step or two.

Surely, they would not shoot a victor. Well, not to kill, at least. But it was amazing what could be healed, what could be fixed, and I did not want to find out whether a bullet in the leg hurt more or less than the injuries I had experienced in the Arena. The very thoughts troubled me, adding to the spreading realisation that I was, if anything, less safe than I had ever been before.

I sat almost huddled in the car, back to a corner, back straight and hands balled into fists in my lap. Two Peacekeepers were in the back of the car with me, while the officer sat up front with the driver. I had assumed that we would take the short route to the Training Centre – there was a longer one, used for parades, but the streets were eerily quiet and clearly there were no celebrations planned for us today, Silence hung heavy on the air, seemed to stick to my skin, and despite the pleasant warmth the Capitol always seemed to enjoy, I shivered.

“Get out,” barked the officer, as soon as the car stopped. I undid my seatbelt as the door opened, but apparently took too long exiting as a hand was placed on my back and I was shoved forwards.

The tarmac bit into my hands as I stumbled, my reactions dulled with fear. There was a time that I never would have allowed my feet to be taken from under me. I was grabbed by the shoulder and hauled upright, almost picked up off the ground, but I simply shook off the Peacekeeper responsible and looked around. There was no other car in sight.

“My father. Where is he?”

The officer walked right up to me, getting uncomfortably close so that it seemed she was almost ready to place her gun against my chest. Her eyes bored into mine, pupils small and bottomless.

“He will be at the interview later. You have practice to complete.”

“I want my father here,” I insisted. It was not about me, or my fear. They could do what they wanted to me in the Capitol, as long as they did not hurt my father. To that end, I wanted him in my sight as much as possible, so that I could know what they were doing.

She shook her head, once, whip-sharp. “You will see him again later. Now get moving.”

The gun in her hands twitched, as the car door closed and it smoothed away again. We were standing in some sort of underground garage, all cool concrete and bright yellow-white lights. No people around me but the Peacekeepers, nowhere to go but through the door at my back. Wishing that I could fight back against my enemies, I held my ground as long as I dared, then turned with my head held high to walk as they directed me.


	22. Chapter 22

Whatever this building was, it was not the training centre. The walls were bare, a uniform pale grey, not brightly coloured and with pictures of previous victors all across them. The dull, dark floor echoed again with our footsteps. Chi Fu’s deep green robes seemed to be the only colour, though there was some sickly smell in the air that made my stomach turn over on itself.

“What am I here for?” I asked him, lengthening my stride to catch up with my Escort. Chi Fu did not look round, though he seemed to try and speed up away from me. The Peacekeepers shot us glares. “The interview, I know. But where is it?”

“A special set has been built,” Chi Fu replied. “Although it will take the form of an interview, and will be done live, everything which you say will be scripted. You are being taken to a set to practice your lines.”

That did not sound much like an interview to me, and I frowned. “Will I get any say?”

“If there are things you want to add, or to change, during this practice will be the time to do so. Of course, if you forget a word here or there, no-one will be angry with you. But it is very important that the message of this interview is communicated.”

I went to ask more, but the Peacekeeper officer cut us off with a sharp gesture of her hand, pressed her palm against a black pad beside the door, and ushered us through. Two sets of lift doors sat ready in front of us, and she called them down the paused with her finger to her ear before selecting the left.

There was barely enough room for all five of us, and I kept my arms tightly to my sides. The air was stuffy, and seemed to become heavier as I felt the lift taking us so high up into the air that my ears popped. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck, and I gritted my teeth. Every fibre in my body was screaming, every nerve that I had trained and every instinct that I had honed over the years. I wished that there was some way that I could end this with one simple fight.

  
  
  
  


"Snow White’s part in the interview has been pre-recorded for your practice,” said Chi Fu’s voice through the speakers. I tried to get less uncomfortable on the single chair in the narrow recording booth, and tugged the microphone lower so that it was level with my mouth. “Remember, you will have a screen to read from, but this needs to feel natural.”

I doubted that ‘natural’ was a concept that the Capitol was at all familiar with, but I held my tongue. “All right.”

 _“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the Capitol!”_ Snow White’s voice, bright and cheery, filled the small booth. _“And welcome to our celebration interview! As some of you may have realised, our victor this year is a very special young man. Aside from his remarkable victory in this year’s 74 th Hunger Games – and how truly charming he is,”_ I could see imagine her swoon, and I winced, _“he has something very special in his favour. For the first time in twenty-four years, our victor Fa Ping is also the_ son _of a victor – Fa Zhou. And for the first time ever, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to invite two generations of victors to the stage for an interview tonight.”_

[Entrance] said the screen in front of me. I presumed that would be the point at which my father and I joined Snow White on screen, and on the set-up stage, ready for the broadcast. I had sat through enough of those in the previous weeks, but my father always hated the time each year when he would be expected to appear in front of many people again.

“Snow White, what a pleasure to see you again,” I said obediently. There was an exasperated sigh through the speakers.

“Could you at least try to sound like you mean it?” said Chi Fu.

“Maybe when I’m actually on the stage, and Snow White is in front of me,” I replied. Not sure where the camera would be for me to glare at them, I fixed my eyes on a random point on the ceiling. “And when my father is with me, for that matter. How am I supposed to practice this without him?”

 _Click_. The speakers being turned off? I slumped back in the chair, then had to grab at its sides before I fell off completely. What felt like far too long later, but could only have been a minute at most, there was another click.

“We’ll skip through the introductions,” said a voice. Not Chi Fu: different, older, without our District accent though they didn’t quite sound like a Capitol resident to me. I looked around me, then stopped as I realised what an idiot I would look. “You’ve handled yourself well enough on stage before now, I’m sure that you’ll manage to remember who you are for this one as well. Talking about your victory will be much the same as before. Let’s skip to the statement.”

“Statement?” I asked, but there was no answer as the screen with my words went black, then a new page came up.

_“So, Ping, tell me, is there any message that you particularly want to give to the Districts? I understand that sometimes it can be hard to find a good time to say things, especially when there’s so much to talk about.”_

“Yes,” I read off the screen. “I just wanted to say that I know some people dislike the Games, but that for those of us who embrace them, they are an opportunity like no other. I have never felt more sure of myself, more powerful, than I did in that moment when I realised that I had won the Games.”

A lie, but not much of one. Where I had been crawling, bloody and broken, many victors in the end whooped and cheered and celebrated in front of the cameras. Out of the mouth of another Career, it might have been true.

“The Games showed me the best of myself, showed me everything that I could be. And I suppose that’s what being a citizen of Panem is about. Sometimes it feels like a struggle, but it brings out the best of us. And... why the hell am I saying this?”

I caught the exasperated grunt at the far end of the speakers before whoever it was caught themselves and suppressed it. As it had been when I was acting for the stage, or when I was sending my message to my father from inside the Arena, my voice had become that persuasive rhythm that I had developed without even consciously practicing. As I broke off into my question, though, I lost that altogether.

“Because, Fa Ping,” said the voice sternly, “it is important, and it is true. And the Districts need to hear this message, so you are going to speak it.”

“Why should I? Why the hell should I be the one to do this?” I half-slid, half-jumped to my feet, almost knocking into the microphone as I did so, and demanded answers from the wall. “There are plenty of people who will talk for you.”

I already knew the answer: I was the victor. I was their most famous and powerful mouthpiece, their most valuable possession – at least until another victor came along with another impressive way of staying alive. I knew why I was the one doing the speech, but I didn’t understand what the speech was for.

“Because it will have the most power coming from your tongue.”

“This is about the unrest in the Districts, isn’t it?”

The microphone clicked to silence, and the little room plunged into solid blackness. It was so sudden that my feet almost gave way, and I stumbled, clutching at the chair just behind me. There was nothing: no silhouettes, no shapes, just dark so thick that it hurt my eyes to be in it.

I hadn’t even been sure that there was unrest in the Districts. It was just something that was in the back of everybody’s mind: the Hunger Games might have reminded us that the Capitol could enforce its control over us at any time, but it reminded us as well that we had rebelled before, and had come closer than the Capitol wanted to admit. Every year, at the time of the Games, there was the little voice that whispered _what if_ it happened again. The Districts made the guns, the ammunition, the electronics, the food, even provided the Peacekeepers to the Capitol. Three Districts trained children, every year, to be killers. What if we did?

The ghostly negative images of the lights faded from my vision, and I reached out slowly to put my hand against the wall. I had lost track of the time already, in the silent dark, not knowing whether they were listening or watching me still.

“You want me to say something that will keep them calm, right?” I asked the invisible figures somewhere outside. “Something that will suggest that District One is still solidly with the Capitol, so maybe other Districts are as well? But in words that are acceptable to the Capitol citizens. Or maybe I’m not supposed to know, to make the rebels think that their influence hasn’t spread as far as they might think?”

My voice was eaten up by the walls and whatever coated them to remove echoes. I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have been a good little puppet of the Capitol and not done this at all – but I had been putting my own life as second in importance for years for the sake of Ping, and perhaps I was still working on finding something to take his place as the _most_ important thing in my life.

After a horrifying length of time, the lights came back on. My hand flew to shield my eyes from the piercing brightness, but relief pounded in time with my heart in my chest.

“Fa Ping, our time here is up,” said the second voice. I couldn’t tell what emotions were behind it. “Get out of there, and your mentor will take you to your chambers.”

  
  
  
  


Chi Fu did not even look at me as he led me back down the corridor and into another room. For all that it had been called my ‘chambers’, it was only one moderately-sized room with a single door that probably led to a bathroom. There was a low couch with thin cushions, a slightly more comfortable-looking chair which Chi Fu immediately claimed, and a table with a large jug of water and a stack of glasses.

I flopped down onto the couch and leant my head back to look at the ceiling. Bare and white, no more interesting or colourful than anything else around here. “Are they going to kill me?” I asked Chi Fu eventually.

He made a strangled, squawking sound that would have been funny at any other time. Now, I just slumped a lower in the chair and hooked one foot over the other, closing my eyes.

When Chi Fu recovered himself, he finally replied. “The Capitol understands that you may have been under some stress recently. It will forgive some... lapses in these early days.”

I understood enough. The silence settled back on the room, as thick in the air as the scent that Chi Fu was wearing. Even so, neither was strong enough to hide the fear that hung with it. I wriggled upright, leaned to the table between couch and chair, and poured myself a glass of water. It was room-temperature, difficult to feel on my lips or my tongue as I drank.

“Okay,” I said, after giving him what I hoped would be long enough for him to recover. “Let’s take for granted that I’ve been really stupid. What can I do now to make up for it?”

“What they tell you to,” said Chi Fu sharply, so fast that it seemed like he was anticipating my question. It did seem like a pretty sound answer, though. “Do what they tell you, say what they tell you, and if you don’t value your own life enough to do it then think of your family.”

He got back to his feet again, in quick rickety movements like an old wooden toy, and crossed the room to stand at the window. I watched him go, looked at his hunched shoulders, the faint shadows of his spine that I could see on the back of his neck. For the first time, I wondered what had led him into this life, why he had chosen to be associated with the Games and the Districts for whom the Capitol usually had so much disdain.

It still wasn’t enough to distract me from thinking of my father. My mother, my grandmother, Ping. The girl who had sobbed on the floor in front of me because she didn’t know who she was, and had been told that she was me.

Instead of my own safety, I should think of theirs, Chi Fu said. It was a threat hidden in advice, and yet it was nothing new. We all knew that the Capitol had the power of life or death over us, like brightly-coloured berries that would turn to poison as soon as the skin split in your mouth. Sometimes it was as if people forgot, thought that the people of the Capitol were jokes with their coloured skin and fancy clothes and heads full of fripperies, but it was a lingering memory with us all. My father had a dogbane shrub, with its delicate white flowers and striking dark leaves, growing in our garden. I could remember being very young when he warned me and Ping about it, saying that we should never trust anything that we did not know inside and out.

Everyone knew what the Capitol could do to you, especially in the Victors’ Village. You did their interviews, or your parents might just fall sick. You went to their parties, or your brothers or sisters might just have accidents that crippled them. You cheered for the Games, or your District supplies might be thin on the ground that winter. Nobody knew it, but everyone said it.

My thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door, and a Peacekeeper opened it to hand a sheaf of paper to Chi Fu. They exchanged words that I didn’t listen to, staring fixedly at the skirting board at the base of the wall. When Chi Fu threw the paper into my lap, I jumped, spilling water down my front.

“Learn it,” said Chi Fu. It wasn’t quite an order, but wasn’t a plea; it was something too tired to be either. “Learn the words, say them when Snow White asks you to, and make it sound real.”

He didn’t need to make the threat again.

  
  
  
  


I learnt the lines, and repeated them in my head until I knew where I could put the cadence, how I could make them sound as if I meant them. Though we had drama classes at school, I had never enjoyed them, found them too fake and constructed to really find any enthusiasm. But Ping and I could always pretend to be each other, and every time my father was called up for an interview, I could act as if I didn’t hate the Capitol for putting him through the pain all over again.

Wei came to finish arranging my outfit before the interview, presenting me with yet another dragon-embroidered tunic. “You know,” he said calmly, as he trimmed and neatened my bobbed hair, “the muttations at the end of the Games were the subject of a Capitol-wide vote. The Gamemakers designed twelve muttations, supposedly one from each District, and the citizens voted on them. They were meant to be released when you were down to the last four.”

“But we went from eight to two so quickly,” I replied. His tone was not – was never – conversational, but I felt like a student being given some inside knowledge by a professor. His hands moved around the ends of my hair, brushing against either side of my neck, and I had to clench my hands around the arms of the chair. Then he was moving again, misting me with something that would keep me looking fresh and shiny for the interview.

“After the vote, the Gamemakers could not go without using them. They hate to throw away work.” He reached into his sleeve and drew something out, holding it tightly. I could see a silver chain creeping between his fingers, and supposed that it must be a pendant of some sort. “Some of us, however, understand that sometimes we will create things that will never be used.”

I watched his face in the mirror, impassive, unreadable, and cocked my head to the side slightly. I didn’t understand, but I could feel that there was something there.

“There are some things which are more costly than others to produce.” Finally he uncurled his fingers to show me what he held:  a crystal pendant, in the shape of a prism, such a bright blue that it seemed to almost be glowing from the inside. “But we must always give people the choice of whether to accept them.

“Sometimes it takes a very long time for us to understand what is right,” he continued. “But some people realise very quickly indeed.”

“How high a cost can there be?” I said, my throat dry as I looked at the pendant. It was the same shade of blue as Kida had worn, before and in the Arena, and I knew that would be no coincidence. The reaction I had received earlier had been enough to tell me that I was right, that the unrest was real, and that it was widespread enough to have the Capitol worried. I wondered why it had not yet reached District Two – or whether it had, but was still a long way away from the Victors’ Village.

Something clicked inside me. Wei knew about the unrest as well, knew that I was supposed to make a speech against the actions of the rebels, but was offering me a pendant that would instead link me to the movement. I looked up sharply to meet his eyes, and he must have read something in me because he gave a tiny nod.

“I have worked with clothes and appearances for decades now,” he replied. “You could say they are my life.”

We were being recorded, there was no doubt about it. Just by offering me the pendant, Wei was committing treason, and he had just told me that he might as well be forfeiting his life for it. If I turned him down, I would not increase the danger I was in. Perhaps the Capitol would even trust me a little more.

I reached out and took the pendant from his hand. “Thank you, Wei. It’s beautiful, very well-made. I’ve never seen anything like it made even in District One.” Probably because we made luxuries, not rebel tools. The crystal was cool in my hand, but it felt as if it were burning. “I’ll think about it. Whether it would do to upstage my own District.” When I tried to smile, it felt like a grimace.

The faintest smile turned the corner of his lips upwards. I could see it more in his eyes. “That gem was made in District One,” he said.

My heart leapt into my throat, and my fingers closed reflexively around the jewel. Then it _had_ reached District One... perhaps not as fights and riots in the streets, but in some way all the same. Was that why men had come to speak to my father? The girl with my name had said that they used the word Atlantis. It was not one that I thought I had heard, but it stirred something deep in my memory. A childhood story, a song, something from years ago that I had put aside as unhelpful because it would never help me in the Arena?

“Again,” I said, “thank you.” Anything more, and I feared that it would be too much.

He nodded. “Of course, I understand if you want to think about how you appear. It is such a delicate skill, is it not? Like a set of scales, where one grain of rice can tip the balance.”

Wei’s words resonated through me, as if I had heard them before, in a different time and place, a different life. The Capitol wanted to place me on their side of the scales, in the hope that I would tip the balance towards them. The pendant was clutched so tightly in my hand that it felt like it might cut into my skin.

All that I could do was not in return to him. His hand lingered on my shoulder for a moment, then there was a knock at the door, and I stood up and readied myself to be led away.

  
  
  
  


The same stage, the same lights, the same faceless audience waited to greet me as I stepped out, waving and trying not to squint into the bright lights. I could see myself on the screens, and recognised the tunic I was wearing more than I recognised my own figure. Light caught on the pendant that I had slipped around my neck at the last minute, making it glint in the darkness.

Snow White greeted us rapturously, exchanged a few words with my father – playful on her part, staid and reliable on his – about promising not to steal me away, or let _me_ steal _her_ away, and took my arm as we made our way back over to the chairs in the centre stage.

There were, of course, three this time: for Snow White, for me, and for my father. It felt very strange to have someone else on stage with me at all, let alone to have them sitting beside me as a reassuring presence. I wanted to reach out and take his hand, but I knew that I was being watched as a victor, and all that I could do was steal the occasional look round. Each time, there was a look in his eye as if he was glad to see that I was still there.

Snow White talked a little about my victory, then went back to the Quarter Quell and my father’s remarkable achievements. With nine kills to his name, he had held the record until this year. My father made short but polite replies, and I wondered whether Wei had meant for me to be the same on stage. But then I saw his foot starting to tremble slightly, and reached out to put my hand on his shoulder.

"You must be so proud,” said Snow White. She looked round to the audience, teary-eyed, and bought a sigh from them. “Who wouldn’t be?”

“I am proud of my children,” my father replied. He turned to face me, our profiles expanded to unnatural sizes on the screens all around us. “Both of them. I know... I know that they will always do the right thing, no matter how hard it may seem.”

“Such an honourable path,” Snow White chimed in.

Baba was still holding my gaze. “Not necessarily the honourable thing: the right thing.”

I one terrifying moment, I knew. As the audience were still swooning and Snow White was saying something that turned to meaningless noise behind me, I raised my hand to touch the crystal at my throat, and my father nodded. He knew; he not only knew, he was giving me permission to do this,

“Snow White,” I said, interrupting her as I turned. She hesitated for a moment, blinking prettily, then gave me her brightest beaming smile and reached out to pat my hand. “I need to say something.”

“Of course, my dear,” she said.

I stood up on shaking legs, stepping forward and any from either of them, because I knew that I would not be able to speak otherwise. The audience was a blank sea in front of me, dotted with blinding lights.

“I was asked to do this interview today for a very special reason.” My voice wobbled slightly, but I steeled myself and raised it to continue. “Of course, having a victor child of a victor is a great occasion for you, the making of history I suppose. And after all, this Hunger Games has been a really... spectacular one.”

I could hear talking, hurried and low, off the side of the stage. They were probably wondering whether I was going to do their speech, whether I had finally seen ‘sense’ and was going to do as they said. I wouldn’t have long before they realised that was not the case.

“Twenty-three children died so that I could stand on stage today. And I was sent out here to tell you how _proud_ I was to be a part of that.” I took a deep breath. “Instead, I’m going to tell you the truth. My name is Fa Mulan. I took my brother Ping’s place as tribute. And I am the _last_ victor of the Hunger Games.”


	23. Chapter 23

The lights went out, the screens dropping to black, and I could hear the horrified whispers that broke into screams at the darkness.

“Mulan,” said my father, his voice hoarse and desperate, and then his voice became muffled as the microphones were also cut. I grabbed for his hand, but felt his fingers slip through mine. I heard him call my name again, and tried to lunge forwards, but then arms were wrapping around my shoulders and hauling me back.

My scream was cut off by the hand across my mouth. I thrust my elbow back into whoever was holding me, and they grunted in annoyance, but were wearing some sort of armour. Trying to sink my teeth into their hand only left me with a mouthful of sturdy glove. As I was lifted off the ground, I thrashed and kicked, and felt my heels connect, but then I was thrown on my face and a heavy weight was on my back, pinning me.

“Baba!” It left my lips as soon as I realised that I could speak again, rushing from my lungs. Not a cry for help: a warning sound. I wanted to tell him to run, but I knew as well as he did that there was nowhere to go.

A hand on the back of my head slammed my face into the stage. Pain exploded across me, lightning-fast, and blocked out everything else for a moment until I remembered how to breathe. By then I was being dragged to my feet, a thin plastic tie looping around my hands to hold them behind my back. I was half bent-over, my shoulders twisted beyond where they should go, more shocking than painful as I was pulled somewhere that I still couldn’t see.

“You did right, Mula-” My father did not even manage to finish my name before a heavy thud cut it off. I screamed in outrage, twisting so violently that I managed to pull one of my arms free, but then something connected with the base of my skull, I felt my head snap forwards and the forewarnings of pain, and everything went black.

  
  
  
  


I tried to fight my way back into consciousness, but I could feel mist slithering in my veins, the prick of needles in my arms. Faintly, I saw the inside of a vehicle, felt movement, then was aware of being taken into another underground garage and dragged into yet another building.

This one was not like the others, not even like the one where I had been taken to do my recordings. The concrete of the walls was bare, cold, hard where I stumbled to my knees against it or where my struggles threw me and the one holding me sideways. I told them to let go, to back off, to go to hell, but they would not even speak in response to me. More than once, another blow landed on the back of my head, not hard enough to knock me out again but enough to make black patches swim across my vision and my feet stumble beneath me.

The tie holding my hands was cut as a door yawned open in front of me, and I was thrown through it, falling to my hands and knees. The concrete scraped the skin from my palms, rattled the bones in my knees, but before I could stand there was a cracking pain in my side, a boot, it had to be a boot, and I almost collapsed. Another kick; this time I felt the pain, thrusting through my muscles, cutting through the shock that was still stopping me from being able to even think.

“What have I _done_?” I said, or tried to, the words forcing themselves out. Of course, I knew what I had done, but I had done so many things; I just didn’t know what it was that I was being punished for.

They didn’t reply, but as I turned my head to ask the next kick caught me in the face. Lights flashed across my eyes as shards of pain stabbed through my jaw, my teeth crashing against each other, and I bit my tongue hard enough to taste blood in my mouth. Somebody hauled me upright by my arms, and I tried to see in the dim light: bare walls, bare floor, shadowy figures in Peacekeeper uniforms surrounding me.

From my side, one hooked a punch into my gut, Hurt forced the air from my lungs, and I fought for breath, even as a second followed it from the other side. I gritted my teeth as one of the figures moved in front of me, faceless, white uniform cast into shadow, and as he raised his fist I leant my weight back against the one holding me to lash out with my foot.

My heel connected firmly in the centre of his stomach, just below his ribs, and he jerked as if given an electric shock. A flash of vengeance ran through me, and I was just about ready to kick him again when there I heard the snapping-out of a baton, and turned my head too late. The Peackeeper bought it down on the locked knee that supported me, hard, sharp, and I felt as well as heard the crunch of cartilage and bone where it connected. Fire flooded my leg, and I cried out, feeling myself start to shake and fearing that the next blow would be the last.

“Stop,” said a voice. I groaned with relief to hear it, even if it was one that I did not recognise, even if I was dropped to the floor and left on my knees, left leg still throbbing beneath me. I looked up, searching for a doorway, but found instead one figure dressed differently to the others. His uniform was black, with no helmet, and his eyes smouldered with a frightening intensity. Whatever relief I might have felt dripped away when I saw the cruel smile on his face.

“Lieutenant Tremaine, what orders have been sent with the prisoner?”

“She is from the rebellion.” I recognised that voice, the one of the woman who had been escorting me since the beginning of the day, and felt my lip curl with anger. I would have turned to glare at or curse her, but it would have meant taking my eyes off the man in front of me. I went to swallow, and ended up choking on the blood, coughing it onto the floor and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. It suddenly sounded very loud in the quiet room. “The President wants to find out what she knows.”

“Marvellous,” he said softly, the ‘s’ hissed like a snake. “Hook, prepare a room.”

One of the other figures nodded. “Yes, Captain Chernabog.”

When I heard the name, a chill ran down my spine. Captain Chernabog was supposed to be a myth, made up to scare naughty children. It was said that he was the head of the most secretive branch of the Peacekeepers, the ones that dealt with political activists or anyone who spoke out against the Capitol. Nobody was sure whether he was a human or a mutt. Now he stood before me, boots planted, a smile on his devilish face as he looked down at me.

“I think it’s time to ask a few questions.”

  
  
  
  


I was in too much pain to fight much as I was pulled to my feet and led to a second room. Every time I did not move exactly as they wanted to, the butt of a baton would be jabbed sharply into my side, or rapped against my knee, and the shock of the pain would be enough for them to pull me around as they wished. The second room was much more brightly lit than the first, the bareness broken up by a single, heavy wooden chair set in the middle of it.

Instinct was enough to tell me this was wrong, and I turned on the guard nearest to me. My fist struck his face faster than he could even blink, and as he jerked back I threw a roundhouse punch, all of my weight behind it, into the hollow of his back. I felt his spine crack, my knuckles split, but as he fell to the floor an arm snaked around my throat and hauled me backwards.

A shriek started to leave my lips, but ran out of air as the arm tightened. I felt my face grow hot, heavy, blood pooling and constricting in my head, and stamped down hard on the person’s foot. They did not let go, but their hold loosened enough for me to gasp in some air, and I drove my thumb and first two fingers, in a tight point, into the underside of his elbow. His arm relaxed, and I launched myself free, only for another blow to crack against my temple and make the world spin.

“No no no no _no_ -” My fight turned into words as they dragged me into the chair, throwing a strap around my chest which they tightened until I could barely breathe, ones around my arms and wrists and ankles and thighs which made my heart beat faster and my skin grow hot and cold. My feet were starting to go numb as they removed my shoes, but not enough that I did not feel the jab of pins entering the top of my feet, the backs of my hands, my shoulders and my stomach. They seemed to drill in, and I screamed, feeling my flesh torn and twisted by them, and even as they stopped moving I could still feel the dull throb of hot pain that surrounded each one.

Water splashed over my feet, and I realised numbly what they were about to do. What they were promising me. Electricity.

“Now,” said Chernabog’s voice from behind me, once my scream had dulled to panting breaths. “Let’s start with something simple. What is your name?”

I gritted my teeth. I had made my choice, and I would not let some uniformed object of horror change it. If this is what the President, the Capitol, was willing to do to me, then all that it made me know was that I had chosen correctly.

He clicked his fingers. A sharp buzz ran up one arm, like thrusting it into cold water, and I grunted as my arm strained against the bonds holding it in place.

“That was setting one. For comparison, this is setting two.”

Another click of his fingers. This time I cried out as it hit, fire lancing up my arm, my bones trying to tear themselves out from beneath my skin. I was panting for breath by the time that I realised that the pain had faded, my arm just shaking now. I made myself look up to meet Chernabog’s eyes, a glint red glint in their dark depths. He was _enjoying_ this, I knew it as well as I knew my own name. I wiped my chin on my shoulder to brush away the blood trickling down it, and spoke around my swollen tongue.

“I just came from the Arena.”

He shrugged, raising one eyebrow, the gesture more than eloquent enough. What pain we could inflict on each other in the Arena, even what pain the Gamemakers could inflict on us, was nothing compared to what they had pin here. What could children or good-living Capitol citizens think up, compared to this man? But I refused to let my understanding show on my face.

“Let’s try again. What is your name?”

I clenched my fists, trying to ignore the way that it made the needles slide in my flesh. I couldn’t tell if it was sweat or tears rolling down my cheeks, but I had not cried these last few days and was not too sure why I would start now.

“Why should it matter?”

Chernabog paused, as if he was thinking it through. “Let’s call it... a baseline.”

Then he clicked his fingers one more time, and the fire consumed my body from the inside out.

  
  
  
  


My vision slowly filled with red, fine darker lines snaking back and forth across it. Light seemed to burn through the inside of my eyes, red to orange to yellow as I struggled my way towards consciousness. I peeled my eyes apart, and light assaulted them; with an indistinct sound in my throat I squeezed them shut again. Turning my face towards the floor, I tried again, though it seemed just as bright.

I was lying on my side on the smooth, glowing-white surface, no longer exactly in pain but feeling dull and giddy. In slow-motion I levered myself upright, watching my hands get further away from my eyes. The light of the floor did not seem to diminish, and I was still half-squinting against it.

I looked around me, or tried to. All around was the same light, a gentle glow in any one section, overwhelming when put all together. I considered trying to stand, but could barely tell up from down, and my sense of balance reeled even as I just rolled over onto my hands and knees. The floor was matt-smooth to the touch, just bright enough to glow out from the cracks between my fingers.

There had to be a wall. Something that I could sit against. It felt as if my insides had been replaced with a thick mass of goo that rolled and shifted like a trapped sea. Slowly, achingly slowly, I crawled across the floor, hand over hand, knees dragging. My head lolled between my shoulders. With each reach, my fingers curled a little more into fists, clawing in on themselves, until my nails scraped for purchase.

When the floor curved up under my hands, I could not understand it. I pawed at the smooth bend from flat to upright, trying to rise up it before I grasped that this _was_ the wall, one which gave me no corner, no edge.

Everywhere around me the room glowed, making my head throb and my eyes itch. I tried closing my eyes, but the inside of my lids still glowed red. When I put my hands over them, the blackness at least stopped the pain of the light, but I could feel animal terror rising in the pit of my stomach at the return of the dark.

I tried to listen instead, making my ears replace my eyes. The room was so quiet that I could hear my own breathing, the movement as I swallowed, the slightest shift of my hands against my face. Nothing else. I tapped my foot against the floor, but even that sound was dulled.

“Hello?”

It didn’t sound like my voice, although it was my throat that was grating. Dry as a desert, mannish-low. I swallowed and tried again.

“Is anyone there?”

Still the silence. Fear tightening around my chest, I slowly drew my hands away from my eyes. Light forced its way back in, but I was relieved to see my own feet sticking out from beneath pants of some thin white fabric. The white made me look dark and dirty, as if they were mottled with–

Bruises.

It came back in flashes. Hard rods pounding bruises onto my fists, my arms, my stomach. Needles sliding into my flesh. A beating that left me breathing blood and floating into unconsciousness.

I refused to answer the questions, refused to confess to the crimes. I didn’t know; I hadn’t done. They didn’t believe me.

On live, national television, I made the Capitol look like fools. I shattered their perfection, and added fuel to a rebellion that I knew nothing about.

My name was Fa Ping, and I was the victor of the Hunger Games. My name was Fa Mulan, and I was a terrorist who had supposed those who wanted to destroy Panem.

The memories flooded back as I saw the bruises left as reminders on my skin. Then I began to scream.


	24. Chapter 24

I didn’t know how long I had been in the room. There was no sense of time, except for my own pounding heart, and I had not been thinking of that as I fumbled with consciousness, or as I screamed. My throat gave way before my fear did, screams turning to choked keening sounds and eventually wearing out altogether with the taste of blood and a sandpaper touch. By the end, I had clutched my arms around myself, as if holding to my body would remind me of what was real, or as if that was some part of me that they could not change. Stupid, really, when they had already stamped their ownership across my body.

The sound of my ragged breathing disturbed me, and I forced it down, the air cold and uncomfortable in my mouth. It was only when my breath was back under my control again that I realised that I had no idea how long I had been here.

The interview had been planned for early evening, for people to watch over supper. My transportation could not have taken long... then the shocks... the beating... blackness... there were too many unknowns, too many questions. All that I could say was that my throat stung from thirst and that my stomach was too twisted to consider hunger.

Baba. The thought of him came to me suddenly, and I felt cold desperation wash over me. Please, let them not have him. Not like this. He had done what the Capitol had demanded for so long now: the Games, his life as a victor, watching his children be offered up for the slaughter every year. To everyone but each other, Ping and I had pretended that we did not know about the nightmares, the fears, the moments when our father would sink into quietness and turn his gaze away, and we would scramble to offer him something to think about instead. We pretended not to hear pain in his silences.

I would have done anything to save him from this, but I knew that I could not. For a start, I had nothing to offer the Capitol: they already owned me and held me captive. Even if I could tell them anything, they would have to reason to release him. And secondly, even if they were to let him go, it could not undo his pain. Ping was gone, I was changed or dead, and a girl with my name, frightened and broken, had been put in his family instead. There was nothing that I could do to help him, nothing that I could do to help anyone – or myself – and that realisation frightened me more than the cell or the pain or the isolation.

There was not even anything to drive the thoughts from me. They circled closer with each feeble attempt I made to push them aside: there was nothing that I could do to help my father, I could not stop them, they could be doing anything to him, to my mother, to anyone, I was powerless. My nails digging into my scalp shocked me back, and I pulled my hands away to see blood on them.

I wiped them off on the top that had been put on me, leaving red-brown streaks on the clean white fabric, and felt in the same instant a flash of defiance to stain their white perfection and a heavy reminder of how red had been the only colour in the Arena. The thoughts sobered me up, and I lay down on my side, curling up and looking at the back of my hands. If I looked closely, I could still see faint pink marks where the needles for the electricity must have been. But the Capitol had various ways of closing up wounds.

I huddled up, hiding my face in the crook of my elbow. Perhaps it would be easier to sleep, to just let the time drift past. Closing my eyes, I tried to let myself drift back away again.

Then the noise started. A drone, not quite a note but like a fly banging hard against a windowpane. I shook my head to try and chase it away, and shifted my arms so that my ears were covered. For a moment, it helped. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, just breathing in and out, not the way my tongue felt too large for my mouth or my skull felt too tight or my feet throbbed or my left arm still had phantom pains running threw it or-

The noise grew louder. It sounded just like the drilling into my skin had felt, and I began to shake, my mind flashing with images of the smile on Chernabog’s face, sensations of fire running down my bones. Even with my hands pressed right over my ears, it could not block out the noise, and the moment that I lessened the pressure it was like the sound slid back into my ears like a physical force.

They wanted information from me. That was all that I knew. They wanted information, and I didn’t know anything that they could possibly want. Everyone in the Arena was dead, somehow there had been something to trigger a rebellion that must have been brewing under Panem’s shadows for years, and I had managed to stumble into it.

“All I wanted was to help my brother.” Had I said that aloud? I might have done; my lips moved, but I couldn’t hear anything over the sound bombarding me. I had already screamed my voice to nothing. But there had been feeling in the bones of my cheeks, buzzing. I must have said it.

Perhaps that was all that they wanted. I doubted it, though. There would be minute cameras everywhere, and they would be recording me. Maybe even in our shrine, our arbour, the place that was meant to be just for our family, they had watched and recorded us. Everyone knew how much the Capitol could do: for all that we knew that it was technology, it seemed strange and impossible enough to us that it might as well have been magic.

I uncovered my face, so that any cameras pointed at me would be able to see. “I was only thinking of my brother,” I said again, enunciating, shaping the words carefully though I still could not hear them. For a while longer I lay there, with my hands over my ears, until my eyes ached and I had to close them again and hide them between my forearms just to get some relief from the unending light.

Part of me wished that I had not done this.

Part of me wished that I at least knew more about the rebellion that I had done this for.

  
  
  
  


One of the mutts, shining black with glistening edges to the scales, hissed its fury into my face. Its mouth was wide and red, teeth silver in the darkness, nicked where it had tried to sink its teeth into my sword and sprung away with a squeal of metal-on-metal. The tongue that lashed between them, narrow and forked, was wet with blood and stank of some sweet decaying poison that twisted my stomach and made me taste hot bile in the back of my throat.

I drove my fist into its upturned, snubbed noise, knocking back its upper jaw, but it barely seemed to feel the blow. A hoarse roar from Helga beside me was enough to spur me into action, though, and I drove the sword on my hand up, with all of my weight behind it, between the thick scales of the mutt’s throat. They cracked apart like eggshell, blackish goo and froth seeping out from between, and I saw my sword go through the back of the mutt’s mouth as it lunged towards me with its final heartbeats.

Pain flashed across my scalp. I didn’t even have the breath to scream as teeth sliced through my skin, scraping against bone, hot wet mouth surrounding my face for an instant before I managed to drag my sword free and lurch away. That forked tongue slid across my cheek just for an instant, across the burning raw skin, but then I was kicking the body aside and turning on the claws that sank into my right thigh, and there was no time to think, just time to move, to fight, to try to live.

One of the creatures loomed over me, eyes flashing, but nothing so human, so _real_ as triumph there to make them anything other than machines of flesh indentured to the Capitol. I remembered driving my thumbs into those eyes, putting out the fires with my hands; any creature had a soft spot in its eyes. Even the Capitol had not yet learnt how to take that away, could not replace flesh with cameras in its mutts.

Hands grabbed my wrists and pulled my arms back, and I was thrown down onto the floor. My head slammed back, and black became white became a figure in a white paper mask and with white paper hair, eyes blank as they handled my face and tried to shine even brighter lights at me. I hissed like the mutts had done, but my mouth was too dry to properly make the sound.

There was no strength in my limbs to fight against the people that held them down, one to each, whilst another set up a pole with bags of some thick white liquid and a third tried to put another needle into my arm. I managed to twist it away, bend at the elbow, but another pair of hands simply pulled it straight by force, and when I tried to speak no sound would leave my lips to protest them.

The needle forced its way through my skin in a little ring of dark oozing blood. The figures spoke to each other, but I couldn’t make out the words beneath the buzzing sound that lingered in my ears. I thought that it might have been there since the noise stopped, but I wasn’t sure when that was to say. A line was set up between the bag and the little cannula attached to my arm, and I felt a heaviness start to seep into me as the fluid began to flow.

My throat felt tight, and my head still pounded, but things seemed to become clearer-edged as whatever it was took hold. I felt saliva in my mouth, moisture in my eyes, cramping in my stomach as my body tried to understand what was going on. There was a strange sensation starting to flood through my arm as well, somewhere in the wake of the heavy fullness from the liquid.

The figure that had been working on my elbow shifted so that they were right in front of me. Their face seemed to fill my vision, the narrow strip between white and white that had colour, tanned skin and blue-green eyes ringed with thick lashes.

“What is your name?” The surgical mask moved as they talked. Wavering.

“No,” I breathed.

The eyes seemed to grow larger and larger, looming dark over me. They filled up the world. “What is your name?”

I thought that I had already said. “No.” It came out as a croak.

“What is your name?”

I closed my eyes and tried to let my head loll back, but there was a sharp slap on my cheek. It stung, made me jump, and my eyes snapped open once again.

“Your name is Fa Ping. What is your name?”

They had said that a lot before, I remembered, in between the electric shocks. Calling me my brother’s name, and then asking for it. I couldn’t remember what I said after a while. This time, though, I felt anger flicker in me, burning in the back of my throat. I looked them in the eye.

“My name is Fa Mulan.”

“Your name is Fa Ping. What is your name?”

My voice faded out, even as I tried to lift my head further. “My name... is Fa Mulan.”

The world spun around me, and I felt myself heave, but then arms looped under my shoulders and hauled me to my feet once again. The numbness of my legs made my feet slip and slither under me, and I watched them move like separate objects. I tried to lurch out of their hold, but all that happened was that I nearly fell forwards, and the hands held me up instead. The floor was miles away; the legs and feet surrounding me seemed to move and whirl in unnatural ways. The only thing that I could feel in my body was the tugging of the line still attached to the inside of my elbow.

“Bring her to the room,” said a voice. I wasn’t sure where from; a black rectangle opened up to swallow me, and my eyes could see nothing once I was tugged through it. Rough, gritty concrete touched my feet, twisted and waved under it. Then something started burning hotter in my hand than ever before, my body went limp in the hands wrapped around me, and blackness washed over me.

  
  
  
  


I was sitting in a chair in a softly-lit room. It stung my eyes, though not as badly as they had hurt before, and though I could feel straps on my arms, legs and chest they were not as constricting.

My head rolled against the back of the chair, cold metal against my hot flesh. My skin felt tight, feverish, the air cold in my lungs.

“So.”

One word, one sound. I was not alone in the room. I pulled my head upright, feeling all of my muscles tense as I did so.

“It’s time for us to have another talk.”

Chernabog sat opposite me. His dark uniform was still immaculate, his eyes still glistening and unreadable. As I fought to focus on him, he lifted and sipped from a glass of water. I wanted to look at that more than I wanted to look at him.

He clicked his fingers. I stiffened in my chair, heart racing, waiting for the sharp bite of the current. This time, though, nothing came. I looked wildly at Captain Chernabog, but he simply sipped more water as a lazy smile spread across his features. Realisation dawned, and anger took hold in my chest; I narrowed my eyes at him and clenched my fists.

“Tell me what you know about the rebellion.”

Such an open question. It almost took me by surprise itself. Every question before had been sharp, precise. I had to wet my lips to be able to answer.

“Nothing.”

Chernabog shook his head. “Now, now, let’s not start this again. Tell me what you know about the rebellion.”

I kept glaring at him, even as my head seemed to want to tilt to the side. My right arm burned dully, pinpricks spreading across my hand. I could still feel the anger, deep and bubbling in my chest, but as I tried to grasp hold of that fire and determination it slithered out of my fingers, wet with the substance pouring into my veins. A tangible weight slipping down through my body.

Words made their way to my lips, threw themselves at him. “Do you really think that there’s only one person who hates the Capitol?”

They had run my life, sent me to likely death, even reached into my body and changed it against me. But they could not take my hatred of them, deep-seated, long-standing, blossoming further and sending out more shoots with every moment that they held me captive and every thought that intruded into my mind of what they could be doing to my father.

He said nothing, simply watched me, waiting. The only sound to break the silence was the dull buzzing in my ears still.

“I took my brother’s place because it was the one thing that I could do for him. Maybe the last thing.” The weight of my head made it droop forwards, and I had to pull it back up again to look him in the eye. Nothing had changed in his expression, but for at least a moment I fancied that there was something there, something that had gone dull, or that the glimmer of enjoyment had disappeared. “I don’t know about this _rebellion_. I understand why they hate you, but I don’t know about them.”

“Don’t lie to me.” The words were cold, and would have been a veiled threat anywhere else. Here, though, the veil was pointless. We both knew that he had control of me. “You know about the rebellion. What was the meaning of the message that you passed to them?”

I frowned. It didn’t seem to be the reaction that he expected, to judge by the momentary flicker that crossed his face. Good, I decided. Perhaps I could give him something back, even if that something was confusion.

“I passed no message.” My words slurred themselves, my lips alternately going numb and tingling, tongue thick in my mouth. The weight in my arm was turning to pain, like my bones were swelling up and ready to pull out of my skin. But at the same time my head was growing lighter, light and heavy at the same time as if it was pulling away from my body and the word was disappearing, and Chernabog seemed to melt into his uniform as I lost my focus on him altogether and forced out a last few words. “Unless that message is that the Capitol is not invulnerable.”

A weak, hysterical chuckle managed to creep out of me. It was funny. What I had meant to be a secret had ended up being thrown to the whole of Panem. I couldn’t see Chernabog’s expression, and he might have spoken but I couldn’t hear the words. The air tried to swallow me up.

“People have always hated you. They just needed to know that each other did.”


	25. Part Five - The Survivor

Unending, burning white light. Needles in my veins to pump me full of fluid. Name: Fa Ping. Name: Fa Mulan. Declarations of hate for the Capitol. Electricity shocking along my bones. Fists in my gut. Breaking bones. Mending bones, burning beneath my skin.

I lay on the floor, curled on my side, with my eyes half-closed. It felt like it had been a long time since the white-clad figures entered my room and poured something into my veins, or injected me with something that would get rid of the black spots in my vision or make them start up again. It always felt like a long time, though. That didn’t mean that they were coming yet.

“Perhaps you do know something,” said Ping. I ignored him, tilting my head a little further so that I couldn’t see him sitting in the corner. “You put things together back that house when that girl was talking to you.”

Those were guesses. I didn’t know anything for certain. Just scraps of ideas that might not have anything to do with each other.

“Maybe it’s not saving me that makes them think you’re part of the rebellion. Maybe it was something else that you did.”

I did so many things, in so little time. It was only a few weeks from the moment that I took Ping’s place to the moment that I stood on stage and made myself a terrorist. I had saved and killed and fought and survived and changed and _been_ changed. Surely replacing Ping had been the most important of those things.

“Important to you, perhaps, but maybe not to the Capitol. Why do the Capitol care about one person?”

They cared enough to torture me. I looked at the round red holes in the back of my hand, scabbed over now. There was a shiny pinkness around them, and they felt hot and aching.

“It’s not about you. It’s about the rebellion. You’re just a grain of rice in the bowl.”

When we were little, Father always used to tell us to pay attention to detail. One little detail can make all the difference. One grain of rice can tip the balance. I was sure that there were other sayings about rice as well, but I couldn’t remember them clearly.

“You were one of the people that were bet on to win the Games. You got a ten. But Kida got an eleven.”

She was the first person to get an eleven since the 57th Games. The last one who scored that high was a boy called Adam, from District Seven, who came from nowhere to win the Games. He had seemed almost like a Career: powerful, arrogant, skilled, and he had taken the nickname “The Beast”. There had been mutters in District One that Seven was going to start producing Careers as well, but there had been no sign of it in the following years.

“It was all supposed to be about District Four this year. What happened with you was unexpected, but they knew that Kida was coming.”

Kidagakash. The She-Devil of District Four. Twice, she had asked me to call her Kida, and though I had refused at training I had started to even think of her by that name when she had used some of her last words to ask me to do so.

The Arena had been strange this year. Small and tight and unvarying. Of course, there were probably only so many ideas for Arenas that the Gamemakers could come up with, but I had been struck even at the time by how it had been. A bombed-out city, a reminder of the Dark Days; water withheld from us, then used as a weapon, then mocked in the terrible rain. Could it have been a message to the District of water?

“District Four is where the unrest is, or at least where it must be worst, if they were asking Baba about it. They have Careers, they have training. They have boats.”

Boats. District Four practiced farming of fish, true, but they also had to go deep-sea fishing to get some of the food that they produced. They had boats, which meant that they could move around, and no matter what the Capitol tried to do to contain them, there would be some that would not be controlled. Even the Capitol could not put a fence around the ocean.

“Maybe you do know something about the rebellion,” Ping prompted me again.

It didn’t matter, though. Those things were so clear that the Capitol must have known them already, before they even started questioning me.

“Maybe it was because you were allied with Kida.”

Allied. Not for long, and not very successfully. I remembered talking angrily to her in training, when she approached me, when we spoke, when I told her not to be so arrogant and she told me not to make so many assumptions. Maybe I, of all people, should not have made assumptions. I remembered, as well, our brief alliance in the Arena before our disagreement about how to proceed drove me away. My aggression to her defensiveness.

“Maybe it was because you saved her life.”

It had all happened in an instant. The rush of water and the clasp of Kida’s hand around my wrist came back to me, and my gaze shifted from the holes in my hands to the bruises from the shackles that had been around my wrists.

“I saved her because I am human,” I mumbled back, and then rolled over on to my other side. Ping stopped speaking after that, and then he disappeared and I was left in silence once again. As the gentle warmth faded from my veins, I started to shake and felt my skin heat up like I was trying to sweat. The cramps in my stomach started not long afterwards.

  
  
  
  


“What is your name?”

I had lost track of the number of times that I had been asked the question. This time, with pain splintering from my knees down to my feet from the spines on which I was kneeling, seemed little different than the others. A different tone of voice, a different pain being inflicted on me, but still the same question from the same person. Captain Chernabog seemed to be quite fixed on questioning me himself.

My hands were behind my back in a reverse prayer position, my shoulders twitching and aching from the strain. A blindfold covered my eyes. But somehow most of that had become distant, peripheral to me. If I could do nothing to stop it, then it was barely worth considering. My life had become nothing more than this: incessant questions, unending and varying pains.

“What is your name?”

Another of the bursts of warm heat was starting to fade once again. A hand grabbed my hair, and I tried to jerk my head away out of reflex, but I could not stop myself from being pulled back, my throat exposed and face turned upwards. I felt the slice of shards into my feet and blood pooling around them. It felt hot and sticky.

“What is your name?” Slowly, drawing out the words. The voice seemed to be coming from somewhere closer now, lowered so that it was almost breathing in my ear. “Tell me, and we can move on. What is your name?”

I was sick of the question. Again and again, whispered into my room beneath the shrieking tone or into the hollow silence, demanded of me, used to threaten me. Hundreds and hundreds of times, asking my name. Then denying whatever answer I gave.

“My name is Fa Mulan,” I said, the words cracking from the stretching of my throat.

“Your name is Fa Ping,” said Chernabog calmly. I heard the movement of another person behind me, and stiffened, but could not see what was happening. “What is your name?”

“My name is _Fa Mulan_.” My name, inside my head, inside my body, they could not take from me. My father had given me that name.

Fabric wrapped across my face, heavy and coarse, and a second hand wrapped into my hair to pin my head still when I tried to shake it away. Instinct screamed in my mind, and I struggled, but all that it did was wrench my shoulders further and slash my legs more as the fabric pressed tighter over my face.

“Tell me your name and we can move on,” said Chernabog again, still calm and composed. “Your name is Fa Ping. What is your name?”

I felt dampness against my face, and the first flush of panic. The smell of seawater surrounded me as the dampness spread, water moulding the fabric to my skin, and I tried to shake my head but was still held in place so tightly that I felt my hair being pulled out. Instinctively I held my breath as the fabric wrapped closer, stinging my eyes, salty on my lips, and when I felt the first burning in my lungs I began to breathe out, as slowly as I could.

Once again I tried to pull my arms free. Pain dragged at me, tight and tearing, but I was running out of air and still water was trickling over my face and down my neck, into my hair, into my eyes. Like drowning. Dying. Fire rose in my lungs to meet the water on my lips, and then with clenching empty lungs and my chest aching I tried to breathe in.

Water filled my nose, wet fabric covering me. I wanted to scream, but had no air. Bright shapes flashed across the dark in front of my eyes, and I wrenched forwards violently, feeling a pop in my shoulder and my whole body arcing, fighting where fighting was all that I knew how to do.

The fabric was removed. I screamed in a breath of air, foul salt still filling my mouth, every in and out of breath noisy and desperate.

“What is your name?” said Chernabog. I didn’t care about him, his questions, didn’t care about anything but the air filling my lungs and rushing to my head.

When the fabric came down again, I tried to scream, but it was muffled in the wetness. I realised too late that screaming would use up my air, and tried to gulp it back again, but the coarse stuff pulled into my mouth instead. I was drowning, I was buried alive in wet soil and it was falling in, filling my mouth and nose and-

Air rushed back, and I whimpered as my body tried to collapse from under me. Chernabog’s voice thundered in my ears.

“ _What is your name?_ ”

“Fa Ping!” I cried, spitting water and tasting blood and bile. I slumped in the hold of the person behind me, hardly feeling the pain in my legs and my shoulder beneath the floating relief to be able to breathe again. Anything, anything not to have that water on my face. “My name is Fa Ping!”

“Your name is Fa Mulan,” he said. I started to scream as I felt a hand wrap around my chin to pull my head further back, and I smelt the seawater closing in on me again. “What is your name?”

  
  
  
  


 

Before, it had been a relief when I was taken to be cleaned. The water was cold, the tiles bare, and the people wielding the hoses wore white coveralls, but it was better than the clinging sweaty fabric and the diaper-like thing they wrapped around my genitals.

Now, just the smell of the water, chlorinated and sterile though it was, sent flashes of terror running through me. I tried to fight off the arms that gripped me, but my shoulder was still raw and felt as if it was going to jump free of its socket again, and when the rough edge of a boot was scraped down my shins I cried out at the pain and the roll of fresh blood that came out from beneath the scabs.

I was deposited into the trough where they cleaned me. It was about one and a half metres in each direction, every edge and corner curved and slick so that I could not get any purchase to climb out, even if I had still had the strength. I was pushed down onto my knees whilst the ties on my wrists were removed, and by the time that I staggered to my feet and clutched at the wall for support, the person removing them had already climbed out and the ladder they used been removed.

Four identical figures stood around me, one on each side of the trough. All of them were wearing white coveralls, white masks across their faces, only a few inches of skin even showing and those eyes revealing no emotion. I didn’t know whether they were Peacekeepers, or something else entirely.

The first one of them turned on their hose, and cold water hit me in the side like a knife. My feet slipped from under me, and I banged against the wall as I fell to the floor once again. Pain rocked through me. With nothing left, I stayed where I fell, half-seated and half-kneeling, ragged clumps of hair sticking to my face and neck where it had not been shaved away or pulled out.

More blasts of water joined the first, buffeting me from every angle. Alternately they stung and numbed my skin, peeled the scabs off my legs and swirled away thin streams of blood. When a jet caught my face, I yelped and covered it with my hands, remembering stinking wet fabric filling my mouth and retching at Chernabog’s feet as I tried to give him my name and he turned down everything that I offered.

I feared that they might see my movement and turn the water on my face more, but mercifully they did not. As the cold seeped into my bones, I started to shiver violently in sharp bursts, falling onto my side in the foetal position where I seemed to spend so much time. There were bruises on that side by now, purple-yellow and faded, but I hardly felt them any more.

After a while, the water stopped. I considered trying to rise, but my muscles just twitched when I attempted to move, and I gave up. When I turned my face towards this floor, at least it did not glow back at me.

I was manhandled back on to my knees, my hands pulled behind my back and tied together with another of the thin plastic strips. It dug into the raw lines already layered there. I tried not to look down at my body as I was pushed back up the ladder and out onto the floor, but it was hard not to. It felt like my flesh was melting off my bones, my muscles tautly outlined beneath my skin, my ribs visible. Bruises still patterned me; although the Capitol would heal any bones that they broke, skin was another matter altogether. Even the damage could not distract me from the deeper wounds, though, the faint lines across my chest which would have been my breasts, the narrowing of my hips and thighs compared to my stomach, the different way that my shoulders wanted to move.

It would have been easier, I supposed, if the Capitol had been able to just reach into my mind and rummage around. Then they would at least have been able to see that I did not know what they wanted to hear from me, and perhaps they would let me go in some way or another. Or perhaps this would not have started in the first place.

One of the figures in white clothing stepped closer to me and started to run the hand-held dryer over my skin, starting with my neck and shoulders before working down. I could hear another one working on my hair. At least I did not have to bear the feel of rough touch of the fabric they used for towels on my skin again. It was the same cloth that had been put over my face each time that they had forced me onto my knees and poured water over me.

The figure straightened up and turned their attention to my face. I winced, closing my eyes against the warm air, but as it turned away slightly I looked into their eyes. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was just to be sure that they were not mutts, or robots in human shape, or something equally outlandish.

They looked back. I couldn’t see much of their face behind the protective clothing, just pale skin and blue eyes, sharp dark brows and high cheekbones with an almost triangular beauty spot on the left.

My heart skipped a beat. “Helga?” I reached for the girl’s mask, to pull it away. She jerked out of my reach, but a moment too late, and my fingers caught on the papery white fabric. It ripped away even under my grip.

It _was_ her. After the faces of the twenty-four tributes had been spread across the whole of the Capitol, it would have been hard to miss one of us; when we had been the last two standing to face the Capitol’s mutts, it was impossible.

I had seen her, torn open by claws and teeth, looking upwards with sightless eyes. The cannon that announced her death had at the same time announced my victory, and must have been the sign for the mutts to be called off. The end of the 74th Hunger Games.

Before I could say anything more, she turned away, hiding her face behind her hand, and one of the other figures stepped between us to start to push me back in to the clothes which I was expected to wear. The diaper-like underwear, the white fabric top and pants. I kept trying to see where Helga went, if it could possibly be Helga, if they could have pieced together the shattered body and the heart which I had seen lying unbeating in her chest, but I was blocked by the others and could not straighten out my back to peer around or over them.

Unspeaking. It was hard to see their cheeks beneath the masks that they wore, but if I looked closely there was a hollowness which might suggest that they were Avoxes. Slaves of the Capitol. And still, in an angry, petty moment, I was not sure whether I would trade my place with theirs or not.


	26. Chapter 26

I did not see the Avox that looked like Helga again. At least, I was not sure that I did. More than once I would turn in my cell to see her standing, waiting for me, her torso ripped open and ribs broken and organs glistening with blood, but I would blink and she would be gone again. I was fairly sure that those moments were not real.

Every so often – I didn’t know how often, didn’t know what time was beyond the beat of my heart and the rhythm of my breaths – figures would come for me. They would force needles into my arms, or my chest, or my legs, and then I would either feel the dullness and heaviness of the thick white liquid, or something else that slithered up and ate through my veins and flashed colours across my eyes. I was fairly sure that those were real.

Sometimes Ping would talk to me, or sometimes my father, or sometimes Chernabog, or sometimes people that I did not recognise at all. Of those, I was not so sure.

In seawater or white light, I drowned over and over again.

  
  
  
  


The concrete floor felt hot and gritty against my cheek, scraping against the raw flesh. Tears trickled over my nose, hair blocked my vision, but I barely had the strength to care. Every part of me ached, dull and distant, and the blood running from my wounds mixed with the blood in which I lay until it was hard to know whether I bled still.

A puff of wind ruffled my hair and tingled on my dry lips. That was better. It still smelt dry, urban, but it didn’t have that stink of death on it. My eyes fluttered closed against the bright light.

Something clattered against the floor. It brushed against my outstretched hand, and I twitched away from it. I hurt too much; I was too tired. When it touched me again, I lifted my head slightly and forced my eyes open to see what it was. Rope. Black rope, synthetic, melted together at the ends. The tip brushed against my hand from where it dangled, and finally my eyes followed it up to see that it was a ladder, reaching up into the blinding white light above me.

“Come on,” said Ping. He sounded as if he was right next to me, but the voice came from the top of the ladder. “We’ll miss the Reaping.”

Of course. We couldn’t miss the Reaping. I took hold of the bottom rung of the ladder and dangled there, almost weightless, surrounded by the liquid white light that filled the space. The texture of the rope began to burn into my fingers as I climbed, my shoulders wrenching with each upward reach. My feet dangled in mid-air.

“Mulan,” said my father, his voice as rough as if he had just risen from a nightmare. I tried to look up for him, but my head was weighted, too heavy to lift. “Mulan, hurry, please.”

The ladder was my only escape. With a grunt of effort, I hauled myself up and reached for the next rung. The wood was slick and difficult to grasp beneath my fingers, and I wished for my belt to wrap around it, but there was no room to do that here.

Sweat trickled down my face, mixing with dust. It left streaks in the blood on my cheeks. My chest hurt as if something was wrapped tightly around it, tighter than the dense top I was wearing in the Arena, so tight that I could hardly breathe even in my stomach.

“Come on now,” said Wei. It was barely a whisper. “Time is growing short.”

Short. Time was always short. I reached for another rung, and it cut into my hands in a myriad of spines. A whine ground out through my teeth as I tried to take my weight on cut-through hands and cut-into bare feet. Little spikes of yellowed bone stuck out from between the strips of blue fabric and the strands of white hair that made up the rungs and shafts, a giant fish hook to snare me on.

I tried to pull my hand away, but it would not move. Looking closer, I could see where the bone of the hooks had cut through my flesh, little barbs on the end holding them in place. It did not hurt, though, and there was no blood from the wounds, just a clear liquid that looked like seawater as it beaded on the backs of my hands and rolled away. Frowning, I wrenched my arm back, and the barbs ripped free, taking with them scraps of my skin and flesh to dangle on the rung like bait, dancing in the blast of air from the hovercraft above.

My other hand was just as firmly stuck, and I had to struggle to pull it free, cradling them both to my chest when they were. The water stained my white clothes darker, then dissolved it away, revealing my chest, flat, scarred, plastic-looking in the bright light. A giant hand reached out and pressed through the skin of my stomach, peeling it apart as neatly as the spines had my hands, no blood, but this time pained ripped through me and I tried to scream, but my mouth was full of water and coarse cloth and then there was darkness, and the smell of blood.

I reached out with one hand, groping into the blackness, reaching for the ladder or the hovercraft or the wall or whatever might be in front of me. A hand wrapped around mine, and with choking gratitude I took hold of it, clinging so tight that I felt bones grinding together in my grip.

The wetness left my mouth, and I inhaled, so hard that it made me cough, so hard that it made me retch. There was nothing left to throw up but bitter acid, and I choked it onto the floor as I was tilted forwards, water dripping from my nose and lips.

“It’s all right,” said Ping, earnestly, somewhere in front of me. It was his hand on mine; I recognised the pattern of soft areas and calluses, the way that he pressed harder with his thumb than with any of his fingers. “It’s okay. Tell them.”

“I don’t know,” I half-sobbed, still panting for breath, then another wave of gagging overtook me and I vomited more acid onto the ground. “I don’t know what they want.”

“The Capitol,” he said. His voice was insistent, like when he was urging me to apologise for something that I had done – or not to take the blame for him. “How are they going to attack the Capitol?”

“I don’t know,” I breathed again, and then the nothingness over my eyes wrapped around my skin and into my ears, and I was lost.

  
  
  
  


“This can’t go on,” said the figure in front of me.

I didn’t answer. The tube attached to my throat felt jagged against my skin, hot and throbbing out of time to the fluid creeping in through it. It had been a long time since I had the strength to move against them, even to scream. My eyelids would barely stay open, my eyes unfocused. The world was a faint, distant blur.

“You think that you can’t take much more of this. But you can. Oh, you can. We can keep you alive as long as we need to, to get that information. The question is, can you bear it?”

 _Click_. A shock burned through my arm, muscles clenching so hard that I thought they might rip from the bone. A grunt of pain left my lips, and I felt blood around the hole in my throat as I swallowed and shifted the muscles there. One drop slowly rolled down my skin, coming to rest in the hollow just above my cheekbone. It felt hot against me.

“You won’t die until we allow you to.”

Alive. I was alive, my heart still beating, even if sometimes it seemed to hurt just to do so. As long as I was alive, there was something I could do. I could _be_. They probably wanted life to be a threat, I realised a moment later. Living in hell. But at least it was living.

“You told us that after District One, they would head for District Two.”

I did? I could not remember the things that I might have screamed. The only truth I could recall was that I knew nothing, could only guess, but that was the only answer that they would never accept from me.

“Instead they are on the edges of the Capitol. Why did you lie?”

I tried to talk, but it came out as a long, hoarse breath. Still dark behind the hood. I felt someone jerking at the line into my throat, removing it, then the straps holding me into the chair were released. One push, and I half-fell, half-slid to the floor, face-down.

Inside my head, the world continued to roll and sway even as I was left there. When it settled close to level, I managed to put my hands to the cold, damp stone and start to push myself up, but a weight landed squarely in the centre of my back and forced me back down again. My head smacked against the concrete, but even that felt strangely distant.

“Tell us the truth. How are they going to attack the Capitol?”

“With hatred,” I moaned against the floor. The weight on my back pressed down harder, taking on the outline of a foot, against the sharp points of my spine. “With vengeance. With anger.”

“Get her up,” said a second voice. It sounded further away than the others, calmer. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. “Take her back to her cell and put that drip back on. I need her strong enough to feel the pain, at least.”

I couldn’t remember the last time that I had felt strong. Hands pulled me back upright, and though I might have been capable of putting my feet squarely beneath me I did not care to. I was dragged back across the floor, over a distance that seemed further this time, the skin on the tops of my feet scraped almost away so that every touch sent sharp agony up me. It turned into one bright blur of pain.

Something flat; I was pulled onto it, strapped down, and then felt the familiar weight of something being pumped into the veins of my neck. The fabric hood covering my face was pulled away, but the light behind was so bright that it hurt, and I let out a mewl of protest, trying to turn my face away. The muscles in my neck would not obey.

“Dose her.” Words. They must have come from someone. Ice-cold spiked into my arm, though I did not feel a needle, spreading up and up until it reached my shoulder and spilled down like a waterfall into my chest. “Let’s see how that works.”

  
  
  
  


The antiseptic smell on the air could not cover the stench of blood and urine and death that cut beneath it.           I lay on my back on a hard surface, the room dimly lit and my body too pained to let me look anywhere than at the grey ceiling above me. I was dimly aware of straps around my arms, legs and chest, that they were uncomfortable against my bones but not so painfully tight as they had been before. Apart from the burn in my neck and the faint flickering shocks that always resonated in my bones, it was almost comfortable.

Quietness. Dark. I let my eyes fall closed again and breathed deeper into my chest, gentle against the pain. Perhaps I could finally sleep here.

The sound of an opening door cut through my peaceful thoughts. My eyes flew open, body tensing; had someone come to take me back to where I had been before. I tried to lift my arms as I looked around, but the footsteps were directly behind my head, and I did not see the person until they were right in front of me.

I screamed. It was Helga, or the Avox-that-looked-like-Helga, with her blonde hair shaved away to only a few centimetres long, her cheeks hollow and her skin pale. But undeniably her all the same. When I ran out of breath, I went to scream again, then stopped and held it back as her eyes met mine for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” the words came out in a rush, little more than a puff of air. She looked at me a while longer, and slowly her impassiveness faded, her brows coming together and the line of her lips sharpening. It made her look more like she had before. “We knew that one of us was there to die, that perhaps we both were. Die or win. I’m sorry that they didn’t let you have either.”

For a moment I hoped that she might respond, but then she turned to the IV pole that had been set up at my side. The bag that hung at the top was almost empty of the thick white fluid which I recognised so easily, and she replaced it with swift, precise movements. I watched helplessly as she turned to go, and strained to reach out after her.

“Please!” My voice cracked. If I had not been constantly reminded of it by my own screams, I probably would not have recognised it. It was far deeper than it had been before, but clenched somehow, like there was constantly a hand at my throat.

I sounded like my father.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pause, still with her back to me. I swallowed desperately, though my mouth was dry.

“I’m sorry, Helga. But I understand. The Capitol turns us against each other so that we can’t see that they are the ones we should be fighting. Like toys in their games.”

The pains that had been sparking in my legs moved upwards, and I gasped as one of them clenched in my stomach. It felt like I was bruised, deep down inside, like there was a hollow filled with pain and hatred. Then another flashed behind my left eye, and for a moment my vision went blank. As it was clearing, I thought that I saw the girl nod, curtly, before she left the room.

Then I was left alone again.


	27. Chapter 27

Time dissolved away again. I could remember Jasmine, cradling the bloody stump of her arm, asking darkly why I had been so willing to throw my life away, knowing as I did that the Capitol owned us, hating as I did the Capitol ways. Why any of the Careers would be so foolish.

“Because we have a better chance,” I replied. “Because then we might have someone come home, and it means that the other children don’t have to worry about whether they’ll be drawn instead.”

I thought of Leah, blonde and uncertain and blinking in surprise as the cameras turned to her. There was always a look of fear in the face of the child chosen: what if this year there was _not_ a Career to take your place? Maybe that was what the children in the other Districts always felt like. Ariel of District Four, with a little fish pin in her hair and the glance around she gave to check that, as everyone had predicted, Kida would come forward this year. The edgy, nervous boy named Max that Eric had replaced. A boy called Chris, who could not stop staring at Helga, and a twelve-year-old girl called Lilo who had not even made it to the stage before one of the older girls burst through to her and pulled her into a tight, desperate embrace. Helga had not waited to be asked to volunteer whilst that had been happening,

“We grow up knowing that we could die, so it doesn’t frighten us too much. And if we win... that doesn’t frighten us either.”

She lowered her eyes, and when I blinked again she was gone. I supposed that I had wanted to be able to say that to the other Tributes before. I had seen the way that they had looked at the Careers – well, at Rourke and Helga and Maleficent and Eric, but they knew us only as ‘Careers’ and I was one of them too – and the mix of envy and fear that had been there. I couldn’t remember a time before I trained, because I was the son of Fa Zhou, but I didn’t know what had drawn the other Careers to put in their names. I had not even stayed to watch Maleficent’s interview, to find out anything about her.

Now I never would.

From time to time, Ping would come and sit on the side of my bed, or rest his hand over mine. Though I knew that I must be the one growing weak by then, my instinct was always to grab his hand and hold it tightly, as if by just that touch I could scare every demon in the world away from him.

“I don’t want to die,” I said to him, one time of many. “They think I do, but I don’t.”

“Then hold on,” he replied.

  
  
  
  


Eventually, the soft lights were replaced with darkness, the hum of distant machinery with silence. I didn’t think much of it, still drifting in and out of my own fogged mind. Then I heard the screaming, somewhere in the distance, and the rattling of rocks together like an avalanche. The pain in my body began to swell back up again, the gnawing in my muscles, the clenching in my gut and the pounding in my head clashing against each other. I groped for the line in my throat, found it sticky with half-clotted blood, and the line collapsed and dry.

I tried to call out, but my throat was too dry to do anything other than croak, and I was left in the darkness. Perhaps I should not have said that I wanted to live; perhaps they were going to let me die after all. Anger almost grew in me, but there was not enough left to fuel it.

The screams faded, and the rattling became dull, uneven thuds. My right arm jittered and tingled, fighting back against me when I tried to clutch it to my chest. Sparks flew in the darkness. Something clenched tightly around my chest, squeezing until it felt as if my ribs were going to crack, and when I tried to hold my breath against it I felt myself slide down into darkness instead.

  
  
  
  


I woke to softness. I couldn’t understand it at first, that what I was lying on was not solid, that something covered me, but slowly I realised that there was something _soft_ and I was lying on it, wrapped in it, something that I could barely remember. Sheets. Blankets. My arms lay on top of them, and there was a pillow beneath my head. The soft, dull feeling of drugs was still heavy in my veins. Maybe this wasn’t real.

I closed my eyes, and counted to ten. It was difficult to remember exactly how the numbers went. The last time there had been counting was when Chernabog was telling me about the shocks. When I managed it, I opened my eyes again, but the ceiling had not changed above me, and the softness had not gone.

There was a light above me, too bright to look straight at but not all painful, and the black bulb of a camera in one corner. Cameras like that were not very common nowadays. I was still looking at it when I heard the swish of a curtain. Those were strange, too.

“Kida, I’m not sure about this.”

The voice was hushed. I turned my head to see who it was – familiar, but I could not place it – only for my eyes to fall on Milo from District Twelve. Holding a finger to his lips, hushing him, was Kida.

“I’ll be fine, Milo. And I have to do this.”

Milo looked at me, uncertainty in his eyes, then almost reluctantly turned away. I let my eyes fall closed again, and tried to ignore the twitching pains working their way through my legs.

“He’s still upset about the Arena,” said Kida. I heard steps draw closer to my bed, her voice become clearer. “He was only going to cut that strap away from his foot. He didn’t think you would attack him.”

Milo with a knife in his hand. I could form the image, but it was hard to place as I groped through my memories. The wrong moments came back: water flooding my nose and mouth, my legs slashed open. I felt myself start shaking as the saltwater-darkness surrounded me, clawing in, my chest burning and empty.

“Fa Mulan.” A hand touched my arm, and my eyes flew open. I hadn’t even realised that I was in the foetal position until I lunged out of it, reaching out for a throat but closing my hand around a wrist instead. “Good morning.”

Kida stood beside my bed. She was wearing clothes I did not recognise, and a scar crossed her forehead. Her eyes looked far older than eighteen, but I doubted that I looked like a child either.

“It’s safe now,” said Kida. “The Capitol has fallen, and we are making up for what was done. You are safe.”

“Safe for now,” I echoed. That was good. They had said that I wasn’t going to die yet.

“Safe for good,” said Kida. “The rebellion is almost complete. And we wanted... and I wanted, as well... to thank you. For the Arena, and for what you told us. I’ve seen nothing braver.”

Panic rose in my chest, my hands starting to shake. No, no, no. I hadn’t spoken to Kida. Hadn’t spoken to the rebellion. Was Kida a part of it? District Four, always District Four. Atlantis. Boats. “I don’t know,” I heard myself say, the words flung out quickly. “I don’t know anything. I’m not part of the rebellion. I was just a Tribute. All just for my brother.”

“I know. I know.” Hands wrapped around mine, warm and work-hardened. Ping’s. No, not Ping’s; the hardness was in the wrong places, there were the little imperfections of scars on the fingertips, and they were warmer than Ping’s had ever been. When I looked, it was even more marked, the hands larger and darker and more scarred than Ping’s had ever been. Some of the cuts looked fresher than others. “And that’s what made it so brave. You didn’t even know that you were helping, you just knew that what you were doing was right.”

Wrong. I had been told that I was wrong, wrong in the darkness and the pain and the big wet hands wrapping around my chest. I frowned.

“Everyone wanted to thank you. But... I especially wanted to thank you. I’m sorry that I couldn’t have helped you more, told you...”

Her voice trailed off. I was still staring fixedly at her hand, wrapped around mine. There were little silver scars on the backs of my hands, ragged at the edges, still a little pink in the skin nearby.

“There is too much to say right now,” she said, as if she was finishing. “I must go, but I will be back soon. I promise you.”

She released my hand, and slipped away, and I turned my face back against my pillow. The light and the clean smell and the softness all felt alien to me, but the darkness behind my eyes had been with me everywhere, and was the one place that nothing else could reach.

  
  
  
  


The next time that the curtain opened, it was a woman in nurse’s clothes. I peered out from beneath the arm curled over my head to look at her, blinking a few times to see if she would stay or not. Unlike the figures that had entered without moving the curtain, come in to scream at me and scrape their bloody fingers across my face, trying to tear me apart, she did.

I uncurled cautiously, though I did not have the strength to raise my head. She placed down a tray on some surface just out of my sight, then stood at my bedside and looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t quite place. Concern? It felt familiar, but I couldn’t find the name for it.

“Your name is Mulan, yes?”

I bit the inside of my lip to stay silent, and pulled away slightly. There was no right answer to this question. Just wrong answers, over and over again.

“It’s good to see you awake this time,” she continued. Pleasantly, too pleasant; I could not hear the threat in her voice, could not be sure what was coming. “Good to see you back with us again. Are you going to talk to me today?” A pause, long enough to make me almost uncomfortable. “No? All right, then.”

She reached to press something, out of my sight again, and the bed started to shift. Animal panic rose up through me, and I started to scramble at the rail on the side, until I realised that it was moving to a sitting position and just watched her warily instead.

“You’re safe here,” she said. The same words as Kida... had used? It seemed fuzzy at the edges. “You’re in hospital. The last of the drugs that were in your system have gone now, so things should start to be clearer again. Do you remember what happened?”

Fire in my bones, water in my lungs. I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to block out the memories.

“When the Capitol was being cleared, the political prisons were emptied, and destroyed. We bought you to the hospital four days ago. You had something in your system which was blocking out reality, but that’s gone now. You’re going to be okay. You’re safe.”

Safe, safe. Lock things up in a safe if you want to protect them. Careers were a safe bet to win. What was safe?

“My father,” the words blurted out before I could stop them. They were stiff, rusty, slow with my District Accent compared to the one that the nurse had. “My brother.”

For the first time, I saw something else flicker in her expression, her brows creasing and the corners of her mouth turning down. “There’s a lot going on. We’re still trying to match people up, get the communication systems working again. As soon as we find them, we’ll let them know that you’re safe. It says you’re from District One, right?”

I shook my head, although it made the room spin and my eyes feel like they were going to fall out. “Captured,” I said. “They...”

“Everyone in the Capitol is safe now,” said the nurse firmly. “And most of the Districts. Only the hub in District Two remains. We’ll find them.”

She leaned in to arrange me into more of a seated position, and though my arms and legs ached when they were straightened out I allowed her to do so. Either this was real, or it was in my head, but either way it was not bad. It did not feel bad. Finally, she raised up the table at the foot of the bed and drew it so that it was closer to my lap.

“And now that you’re awake, let’s see if you can feed yourself,” she said, and moved something from my side onto the tray in front of me.

Soup. A bowl of soup, with a spoon beside it. Solid white crockery and a proper spoon. I had seen these things before, but it felt as if they had been used by another person, a long time ago. Cautiously, I reached out for the spoon, but the hand that wrapped around it was crabbed and clawed, the bones prominent beneath the skin, the nails shredded away to almost nothing on the fingertips. I stared at it in horror, and as the nurse reached down to help it take hold of the spoon I realised that it was my hand.

It felt alien, unwieldy. It took me several attempts to hold the spoon flat, and even then my hand shook so much that the nurse had to prop me up and raise the table so that there was barely any distance between the bowl and my lips.

The soup was slightly warm, thick on my tongue, and I padded my mouth at it for a moment before recalling how to swallow it down. The first one was difficult. I could almost feel it slide down my throat, into my shrunken stomach, strange inside me. The second spoonful made it to my lips a little more smoothly, and down my throat a little more easily, and then the action became familiar again and I managed, in jerky movements, to clear the small bowl. The nurse wiped my lips and chin clean, but she was smiling again even as I stared stupidly at the bowl, not sure whether there should be more there.

“We’ll only be feeding you a little at a time for now,” she said. “Until your body can get used to it again. But this is good, Mulan, this is really good. You’re doing so well, already.”

Her hand was warm on my shoulder. I wanted my father, the cold fear for him hitting me again like a sudden wave on a calm day, and I curled over on myself with a whimper. What good had I done if he was not safe? And Ping. All of this had been meant for Ping, and I did not know where he was.

This time, though, there was a hand on my shoulder until the worst spines of fear that drove into my stomach were gone, and when I lay back down again the softness did not disappear. The only screaming now was in my dreams.


	28. Chapter 28

With each nurse that came, I began to believe a little more that this was real. The hand that bought the soup to my lips became steadier, and though I screamed the first time that they took blood from me, I did not thrash and after that managed to remain quiet.

Ping did not come back. My conversations with him before had probably not happened, I realised, and when it dawned I curled into a tight ball and pressed my face into my knees, and it took a long time for one of the nurses to coax me back out again. He would be found, she said, as I had been found. It might just take longer because he would not be recognised as I was. I tried to tell them to look for me, for the other half of me, but the words would not come out as anything but a keening sound.

Some number of bowls of soup and times asleep and nurses later, the curtain opened to reveal Kida once again. The cuts on her hands were faded, now, and when she gave me a tired smile I saw the little nick in her tooth. There were shadows beneath her eyes.

“Why?” I asked, and was not even sure what question it meant. There were so many things I did not understand.

She came over and stood by my bed, placing both hands on the rail. I had taken to sleeping with my head slightly raised, to help me stop curling up as soon as I stopped thinking about it. “Why now?” she asked in return. “Why me? Why you?”

“Why save me?”

The words cracked, and I saw her look pained for a moment. “The same reason that you saved me, in the Arena, I suspect. Because that’s what humans do. What the Capitol forgot about us.”

It was too much, too big. I closed my eyes and tried to get hold of the words, but they were too powerful and wriggled out of my grasp again. “The rebellion,” I said. “What rebellion was it?”

“The one that’s been building for many years,” replied Kida. “The Districts hated the Capitol even before the Dark Days, and they’ve only grown worse since. Cutting us off from each other, using us as slaves and toys. It was only a matter of time before people rose up again.”

Yes. Those words were smaller, were understandable. I nodded as I opened my eyes and looked at her again. It was easier if I cut things into smaller pieces, sights and thoughts and words all.

“Things were roughly prepared by a few years ago. People in every District who would be able to seize power from the Peacekeepers, sympathetic mayors or sympathetic people close to them, people who had experience of being leaders. The difficulty was always communication, getting messages to each other when the Capitol did not want us to. For the Districts that bordered each other, it was not too bad. For those with rivers or wild country in between, it was harder.

“There needed to be a signal, something that everyone could see and know to act on. And what does the Capitol ensure that everyone in Panem watches?”

Public screenings, crowds, signals to every television in the country. “The Games,” I whispered.

She nodded. “It should have been four years ago. My grandfather did not want me to be the signal, but I insisted. Appear to let people know, then when the rebellion was moving, break through to beneath the Arena for the rebellion to get a group of us out. While the Districts are preparing, and the Capitol is distracted by the Games – it seemed the perfect time.”

“You weren’t killing,” I murmured.

I was not sure when I had realised it – certainly not during the Games, but perhaps in those blurry days after, where it had settled deep in my brain and had not risen to clear thought before. I had seen Kida fight, yes, defending herself in the first Bloodbath and knocking out first Helga and then me during the Feast, but she had not killed. Even when she had pressed her fingers to my throat.

Kida blinked in surprise, and tilted her head to one side, but I saw the corner of her mouth twitch back towards a smile. “No. Enough people had been killed by the Games. Because of the girl that took my place, those extra four years means ninety-two more deaths. This was my last chance, before another Tribute from my District would have to be found, one prepared to risk death just to deliver the message.”

Message? I frowned at her, unsure what she could even mean. Had she not called herself the signal?

She must have seen the confusion in my expression. “Ab extra salus. From beyond, salvation. An old language... very old. Nobody in Panem speaks it any more, nobody would know what it means unless they were passed the message from mouth to mouth. But in truth, it always went deeper than a handful of words, or a handful of people. The rebellion was in everyone who hated the Capitol.”

Those words, at least, manage to make sense as they make their way into my head. I nodded, dully, but then the world began to shudder around the edges and I had to close my eyes again to make it stand still. A touch ghosted against my arm – I jerked back, squeezing my eyes more tightly – and I heard a sigh.

“Sleep well, Fa Mulan. I will ask after your family.”

  
  
  
  


They found my grandmother first. As communications were gradually re-established with the Districts – early on, the rebels had dropped rockfalls over the tunnels that led from the Capitol to the outside of Panem, and it was taking time to clear them – I heard more and more crying and laughter from outside my door, more and more running footsteps, more sounds of life. It took a long time, though, an achingly long time, until one of the nurses at my door appeared with a smile on her face that was warmer than usual.

“Mulan... your grandmother is named Fa Heng, is she not?”

I looked up from my hands, where I had been watching the scars fade day by day. “Yes,” I tried to say, only for it to come out a yelp.

The nurse hurried to my bedside, putting down the tray that she carried, and made sure to stand close to me. She was smiling. That should mean a good thing. I wasn’t sure, though, that I could guess what other people thought was good any more.

“She was in the hospital in District One,” said the nurse. I let out a shaking breath. “Nothing medically wrong, just prevented from leaving. There were several wards, with people over seventy in.”

I had been right about... something. I wasn’t sure what. Master He, vanished from the garden, and my grandmother gone, while I was in the Arena. That might have been before the rebellion stole the Capitol’s attention.

My grandmother was alive. I would get to see her again, to hug her tightly and have her pat my back in that way that said, better than words did, that everything was going to be all right. Grandmother could survive anything.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling once again as if I was about to cry. My breath came out wobbly, and my eyes burned, but it was relief that was flooding me as the nurse put the tray of food down and went to check my chart at the end of the bed.

“I hope I get to see her again too,” said Ping. Blood was spilling over his lower lip, bubbling on his words.

I screamed. It hit me like a blow, ripping through my throat, tearing away every scrap of me that it came through. One breath, just enough for a second scream, and then I was reeling in blood-red noise that pounded through me, my sight going as almost pinpoint-narrow even as the nurse tried to talk to me, soothe me, remind me that I was safe.

It was not my safety that I screamed for. If it was, I would have no more need to scream. But _Ping_ , I wanted _Ping_ safe and sound and at my side, like we used to be, and my horror forced out scream after scream until the world almost went black and I was dry-sobbing, dry-heaving, bent over at the waist with a cool hand on my brow.

“It’s all right,” the nurse was saying, over and over like a chant, “you’re all right, Mulan. Come back to me. Come back to me. It’s all right.”

I looked up to where Ping had been standing, but he was not there this time. One glimpse of him, one _true_ glimpse, and I would have given up anything in the world. Stopped hating this torn body of mine, gone back into the Arena all over again. If he was all right.

But he wasn’t. One more attempt to scream strangled itself in my throat, cutting off my air, and I desperately tried not to see Ping’s accusing gaze still burning into me.

  
  
  
  


A few days later, they sent Kida in to talk to me again. Just the day before, the nurses had been saying how I was slipping back under again. Without a reaction, I supposed that they had no need to believe that I heard them. I still ate the food that they gave me, my stomach desperate after so long without use, but I didn’t notice what it was. When they let me shower, I stood under water and made it hotter and hotter until I could finally feel it on my skin.

They tried to give me books, but I left them aside. I did the same with the paper, and refused any visitors who would not be my family. Most of the time, I stared blankly at the ceiling or the walls, occasionally asking Ping if he was there, and receiving nothing in response.

Kida let herself into the room, without either a nurse or Milo at her side. She looked if anything more tired than before, and had faint bruises on her cheek.

There was a chair in my room, but it had stood unused. I had not seen a point in using it, and there had been no-one else to. Now Kida picked it up by the back, moved it to beside my bed, and sat down heavily to regard me with her burning blue eyes.

“Why did you come?” I said, or croaked. My voice still wasn’t doing too well.

“After what happened, a lot of the victors were captured. It seems that the best way to calm them has for been for them to connect to each other – to people they know, who went through a similar thing.”

“I don’t know the other victors.”

That was not much of a lie. I knew _of_ various of them: Ting-Ting from my District, victor two years ago, with her brittle smile and harsh determination; Shang; Cobra, I was sure that was his name, from the 68 th Games; Philoctetes from the 47th Games, the only male victor of District Five, infamously foul-tempered; the oldest victor that I had ever met, Gothel from District Eleven who had to have won back in the 25th or 26th Games now. Other than my father, though, I could not really say that I knew any of them as more than a face and a name.

“No,” said Kida gently. “And as far as we know... none of them have been through what you have. But I thought it might be good to at least have a familiar face around. Someone that you can be sure isn’t working for the Capitol.”

This time I narrowed my eyes at her, anger suddenly rolling over me. “And how should I be sure of that?”

“Well... as sure as you can be, at least.”

There was an edge to the words that made me fall quiet, and shuffle where I sat so that I was more upright. The nurses had been encouraging me to move around more, to stop the sore bruise-like patches that were developing on my shoulders and hips, I had tried to care.

“I suppose that the Capitol might tell a spy that they could say that they hate Yensid, and the people he represents. There’s little that I wouldn’t put past them.” I had heard that breeziness before, in other people’s voices; it was as if, by talking in that way, it somehow softened the horror of their words. “My grandfather and my parents were all involved in the rebellion, many years ago now of course. That was why no-one volunteered to take my mother’s place in the Arena – not even the Career girls. They didn’t ask for volunteers, and anyone who did would have been shot. It was carefully cut for the Capitol. They knew that apart from the Careers, no-one from District Four would have a chance of making it back. Some say that the ‘Beast’ was a Capitol plant... that one, we can’t be so sure of.”

She held my eyes, unflinchingly. Although the nurses would meet my gaze when I tried to bore holes into them with it, most of them would glance away after a while, or shift to looking at my forehead or my nose instead. Ping had – half-laughing, half-serious – once called it my killer look. Now I really was a killer.

“Do you think I would work for them?” Kida’s lip curled even as she spoke the words. “For Yensid?”

“Or you’re not real,” I suggested, more to myself than to her. “Hallucination. Imagination. Mutt. Clone.”

Clones... they were something out of stories and whispers in the dark, something that had never been proven, but the Districts probably did not know what the Capitol was capable of. My father had been offered the chance, when he was younger, to have a prosthetic leg made or even a matching flesh one grown for him. He had refused every time.

“I suppose I could be,” she said, “from where you sit. A shot of tracker jacker venom and perhaps I would be. I can do nothing to convince you one way or the other; all that you can do is trust in what you find real or unreal.”

We sat there for what felt like a long time; I held Kida’s gaze at first, then slowly looked her over. Her hair was like it had been in the Arena, give or take, and her skin was a little paler but that could have been the lights. She was wearing quite ordinary, rugged clothes, and had the scar on her head and the bruises on her cheek. When she talked, I had seen the little notch between her incisors.

“Tell me about the fishhooks,” I said, finally. District One Careers knew a little more in the way of survival than District Two, but not as much as District Four. We had all taken slightly different paths.

A flashing, momentary smile showed me her teeth again. “I hope one day that you will see District Four. That people will be able to travel freely. It is coming, soon.

“I have been making fishhooks for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is sitting with my grandfather, watching him twine the hooks and connect them to the weighted lines and nets, so the fishers on the sea could use them. The young men and women would be the ones on the boats or at the farms, the strong ones. Old people like my grandfather, or children like me... we made the hooks instead, and prepared them for the longlines.

“The different hooks, lures, baits are all made for the different fish. It is an art, and a science, both at the same time. So... bluefish, for example, like bright jigs, and it’s good luck to use blue fabric when you make them. Pollock like lures that flutter well, but they have to be resilient, so we often use bone. Stripers come best to live bait, but they’re worth it because they sell well to the Capitol for the eggs. I suppose that trying to claim that ‘fish’ are all the same must be like trying to claim that your ‘luxuries’ are all the same.”

“They’re all the same when they go to the Capitol,” I said.

“That is true. But perhaps we know better than them about things like that.”

I rubbed the small scars on the back of my left hand. I was regaining the weight that I had lost, my hair growing back in. But for the occasional twitching of my limbs and the small set of scars, I could almost have believed that it had all been taking place in my head. Unexpectedly, the image of Quasimodo came to me, and I remembered how disgusted Chi Fu had been at the sight of him. His mentor had not put him up for surgery – either unwilling or unable – though Shan Yu’s stylist had done work, and Milo’s eyesight had been fixed. Dolls for the Capitol; anything that they can’t see, doesn’t count.

“Do you want me to tell you about something else?” said Kida, perhaps seeing the glazing over of my eyes.

I nodded impulsively, and tried not to think of Quasimodo. “Please. Tell me about pearls. District One works with them... but District Four produces them. No District really works alone.”


	29. Chapter 29

“Tell me about Yensid.”

It had become comfortable for us, this way of talking. It was easier for me than trying to form real questions, and I got the feeling that it was easier for Kida than trying to come up with a way to explain everything that had happened. I felt as if I had woken up in a different world from the one I had known, and I didn’t know where to look first when everything around me had been changed.

“There isn’t that much known,” said Kida darkly. “I doubt we’ll find out even when the last fortress is bought down, and he is found. My grandfather says that Yensid became President before the Dark Days, did away with elections during them. He’s ruled ever since.”

I couldn’t remember if my grandmother had ever said anything like that. I would have to ask her one day. “Nobody could live for that long.”

“Who knows what they did to him in the Capitol? Replaced his organs when they failed?” She had a point. “It was him who shaped Panem to what it is today, though. He made the Districts. I mean, they had been there before him, but he shut them off from, each other.”

“Really?” I sat on my bed, stiffly cross-legged. My legs ached from the position, but it made me feel comfortable inside. Like there was a _me_ to think about. I had a child’s toy in my hands, a circle with notches around the outside and various coloured threads, which made patterns like a spider’s web. I had been good with it once. “How do you know?”

“Seventy-four years feels like a long time, but... maybe it isn’t. My grandfather heard stories from his parents, his grandparents. The Districts used to be more... varied in what they produced. They still had to trade things, but not like they do now. So District One would produce most of its own food, but it would also collect fur and sell that, or gold for the electronics in District Three. District Three would trade machines for things that it couldn’t grow. District Four ate its own fish, District Eleven its own produce.

“The Capitol, though, and District Thirteen... they were different to the others. District Thirteen just produced energy, hardly anything else, and had to trade it all away. And the Capitol... well, they just sent people out to oversee things.”

I tried to imagine a world like that. The houses in the Victor’s Village probably had more District One produce than most of the District One people did. Even so, they were made of stone from District Two, with tools from District Three. We ate fish from District Four and meat from District Ten and grain and vegetables from Districts Eight and Eleven. Everything had been bought there at the order of the Capitol, and even what we had of our own making had belonged to the Capitol before it was given to us.

Kida watched me carefully. Her posture had not changed – it was easy, almost relaxed, one arm on the back of her chair and one ankle hooked over the other, stretched out in front of her. But her eyes were still keen, never wavering from me.

“If the Districts could manage well,” she continued, more slowly now, shaping the words before she spoke them, “then why would they need the Capitol? _It_ needed _them_. And I think – many people think – that District Thirteen realised it, and that was what caused the Dark Days. That the Districts could have removed the Capitol like plucking off a tick.”

“Is that what the rebellion is doing now?” I managed. Coloured threads tangled in my fingers, but I barely saw them. “It isn’t like that now. We can’t...”

“No, the Districts aren’t as separate as they used to be,” said Kida. “But how they are is unnatural. There has never been anything as artificial as this before.” Now she was sliding upright in her chair, a light flashing in her eyes and excitement cracking through her voice. “There are history books, in Atlantis, from before the Dark Days. They say-”

“Atlantis?” My voice came out louder than I had meant it to, and the word seemed to boom in the hospital room. I winced, but Kida did stop her quickening stream of words, appearing to gather herself as she took a deep breath. “What is Atlantis?”

“Atlantis is an island,” she said. “Outside of Panem’s control. And it is where the rebellion has grown.”

  
  
  
  


I had been right about boats.

“The thing about the sea,” said Kida, her eyes glowing again, “is that it is alive. Not _alive_ , I suppose, but... it always changes. Like it has its own thoughts. The Capitol don’t understand it, and neither do District Three, so they can’t make machines that can sail there the way that people from District Four can. Not many of us become Peacekeepers either, and those who do aren’t usually the sea-folk proper.

“No matter how many cameras or bugs the Capitol uses, they can’t control everything that happens out at sea. Saltwater always consumes things sooner or later. And even District Four sailors aren’t perfect: every so often, a boat gets swept away, out to the south, and we think it is gone forever. It is how my father...”

For a moment the light in her eyes dimmed, and she looked away from my face. I had the sense that I should look away from the pain that flickered there, now that her words had gone where she had not meant them to, but it was difficult. If she remembered her father at all, it was faint, or fuelled by other people’s stories. _My_ father, my _Baba_ , was out there somewhere and I didn’t even know if he was alive or dead, and it took all of my self-control not to scream for him to come and wake me up out of this nightmare.

Finally, Kida gathered herself to continue. “Sometimes a boat disappears. Even more rarely, it comes back. And a few of the sailors, when they came back, talked of an _island_ , outside the Capitol’s reach, where they still knew about what had happened before the Districts, before Panem even existed, maybe even as far back as the disasters that changed the world. They called it _Atlantis_ , though I think it had another name once.

“Eventually, people began to go there deliberately. They learnt the waters, and once that was done, they realised that they could go both there and back. If done well – and with luck – the Capitol did not even need to know. Finally, there was somewhere, somewhere on land, where the Capitol did not go.”

“And that is where the rebellion came from,” I finished quietly.

She shrugged. “Well, as I said, the rebellion _came_ from every person that hated the Capitol. But it is where it grew, I suppose, or at least grew best. It was where ideas could be discussed outside the Capitol, where arguments could be made, and where plans could be laid out. Though plans, of course, had to change to take account for what we found in Panem...”

I caught the last of her words, and looked up sharply. “We? Have you been there?”

“No.” It came out as a sigh, a weary breath. “I just forget sometimes that, well, no. It does not matter. The victors and their mentors were the best way to pass information from District to District, during the Games and the Victory Tour. But those are only twice a year. It is why everything took so long to come to this.

“Finally, though, it did. My Reaping was the signal to the people across all of the Districts. Those that other mentors had found reliable; it all spread by word of mouth, of course, explained to them just as I have explained it to you. As far as most people are concerned, it will be perfectly fine to hate the Capitol, to rise up and cast them aside. But after that, we will need to think about what will happen in the future.”

“And what is that?”

“Who knows? It is the future, after all.”

For all of their technology in the Capitol, as far as I knew they did not have machines that could foretell the future. Perhaps if they had, they would have seen this rebellion coming and quashed it before it could even begin. If what Kida had said was true, though – and I had only one reason, my own doubt of reality, to believe that it might not be – then the Dark Days had never really ended any war. It had just put it off a while longer.

Kida rose to her feet as I was still lost in thought, my head bowed. Her touch on my shoulder drew my attention back to her, and she gave me a bold smile. “What I hope, though, is that we will find some more natural way to live again. One where the Capitol does not take the heads from the fish before they are returned to us. Where we can actually get some return from the work which we do, and have some say about what is left over from it.”

“That’s a lot of voices,” I said. The roar of the faceless crowds that lined the parade grounds of the Capitol filled my mind, sent my heart pounding in my chest as I tried to hold on to _now_ , to _here_. “Surely someone will be louder than the others?”

“Yes, some people will be louder than others. But if many people speak together, they are more powerful than any one voice can be. It has been done before, or so I have heard. And if we have learnt it once, surely we can learn the same lesson again?”

For that, I did not have a reply, and she left without saying any more but with one last smile. I wished that I had a fraction of her faith, but I supposed that she and her pack had not been the ones to kill in the Arena. With a thousand voices screaming at me to kill, though, I had done so.

I looked down at my hands, the faint scars, my nails still bearing their indented lines. But the scars from that terrible rain in the Arena was gone, and so were the older ones, from where I had still be learning to use weapons or start fires or even just cut meat. I was missing all of the little marks that had made me, and only had left what the Capitol had seen free to give. No, not to give, to _inflict_.

 _But I am me_ , I told myself, with the even silence of my own thoughts. For now, I did not bother with a name.

  
  
  
  


They found my mother next. Well, probably not ‘next’; for all I knew, there were hundreds of prisoners in the Capitol’s cells, and thousands of people to put back in touch with each other. In my life, though, my mother was the second person to be declared alive, and because she had been held in the Capitol we were able to meet.

“I want to go to her,” I said to the nurse.

She shook her head, and my heart seemed to ache in my chest. “Empty apartments are being used as shelters. Your mother would be sharing with other people. It’s best if she comes here instead; I’m sure that we can find another bed from somewhere, or at least something. She can share this room with you, if you want.”

The relief in my face was almost strong enough for me to think that it was everything that I had been hoping for. Arrangements were made to have us reunited as soon as possible – only possible when people were in the same District, the nurse reported to me – and I received the message at sunrise and my mother at sunset.

I had managed to get out of bed and into proper clothes that had been found somewhere for me. They felt strange, and were probably Capitol cast-offs to judge by the thick fur of the vest and the baggy, ballooning pants, but they were clothes and not shapeless hospital pants or gowns, with my hair brushed and parted down the middle, I looked a little pale and thin but, the nurse assured me, passably well. I hadn’t yet seen myself in a mirror.

My mother arrived shortly after dinner, which I had struggled to chew enough times to make it soft enough to swallow, rather than having it stick in my throat. I sat on the foot of the bed, bare feet dangling and feeling ridiculous, when there was another light rap at the door and then it opened, slowly again, my body so jerky that I could not even move fast in comparison.

“Mother.” I threw my arms around her before she could even speak, and my word was half-muffled in her hair as I squeezed her tightly. Her arms wrapped around me in return, feeling as if she was clinging to me. She felt frail to my touch, not starved but weakened, and in the instant that I had seen her face before drawing her close there had been shadows there.

“Oh, Mulan,” she said, murmuring into my shoulder as she held me close once again. I had not been one for hugs when I was younger, but now it felt like the most important thing in the world to be sure that she was real, and even as she drew back and placed her hands on my cheeks to scan my face I realised that I had a smile on my face. I hadn’t felt like smiling in such a long time that it made my cheeks hurt, but it didn’t matter. Grandmother was alive and safe in District One, and Mother was back here with me, and...

And each step was more than I could ever have thought to hope for. My smile faltered, not just from thoughts of Baba and Ping but when I saw the sagging of the skin at my mother’s jaw, the faint greenish cast to her cheeks in the harsh hospital light. The morphling must have done more damage than I had realised.

“It’s all right,” I managed to make myself say. “We’ve got this far, haven’t we?” _Please, let us have all have got this far_ , the words that I didn’t add but which lingered too closely to my tongue. I hugged my mother tightly again, closing my eyes, as finally she began to cry into my shoulder. Part of me wished that I could cry with her, but in many ways it was easier to just hold her and let her do the crying instead, not least because I knew exactly what I had to tell her would happen in order for things to right themselves again.


	30. Chapter 30

They day that they found my father was the same day that the last Capitol stronghold fell. I never did find out for certain which one of them actually came first, because by the time that the news from District Two reached the Capitol, the first celebrations were apparently already underway.

My mother was asleep. She slept a lot these days, but she was coming back, slowly, talking like she had before the Reaping. She worried about my hair, which was still uneven, and was trying to work out a way that she could cut it to make it look nice again. She promised that she’d let me get whatever clothes I wanted, when we got back home. Just once, when she was holding me tightly, she touched my chest with a questioning look, but when I choked on an attempt to explain she told me that it didn’t matter, and just squeezed me tighter. I wasn’t sure that I had words to reassure her in return, or even to explain how much her words meant to me. So while she was asleep, I watched over her, and tried to put together words that would not come.

Every so often, in some sort of desperation, I would glance towards the corner of the room and hope that Ping would be there. He still wasn’t.

There was a light knock at the door, but I didn’t respond. _Permission_ was an old idea. The door opened, and I turned my head to see another of the nurses. They didn’t wear name badges, and had never introduced themselves, but I recognised this one. Reddish-brown hair worn in a bun, square-framed glasses and a gentle touch; her accent wasn’t Capitol, though I didn’t recognise it.

“Mulan,” she said, a touch of urgency in her voice. “They’ve identified your father.”

Identified. The word closed around me, like grey fogging around the edges of my sight. Not found, identified. I tried to imagine world without my father in it, without his steady grace and strength, the courage against what had happened, the way that he had held me when I left and when I came back. It would not form: the world would be changed without him, a different one with a hole ripped in it. I started to shake.

Hands wrapped around my shoulders, and the nurse squeezed just enough for me to look up from the floor and back to her. I hadn’t realised that my mind and eyes had slipped away. Her brow was furrowed, and I saw her in such detail that I could hardly take it in. The world had too much in it. I tried to pull away with some sort of sound, but she held on.

“-sorry, I’m sorry,” she was saying. “I mean, they’ve found him. They had a lot of people to work through, but they’ve found him. They’re bringing him here. Now.”

Which words were real? Identified. Found. Was I just hearing what I wanted to hear? There might have been a time that I did not care, happy just to hear the words at all. But I wanted them to be _true_ , to be _real_ , to keep existing.

I took hold of the nurse’s wrists, and could faintly feel her pulse beneath my fingers. Grandmother, Mother... Baba. It had to be true.

“Where is he?” I said.

“He’s on his way. There are a group of them that have been found that have family here, they-”

I knew that there were other people, but I didn’t care. If they had family here, then their family would care, and they could be together. I just wanted my father back, safe, wanted to know that there was something I had not broken.

I stood up, pushing the nurse out of my way. The strength hurt, but it was like a close memory, fitting to me. She was saying something, trying to restrain me, first by the arm, then calling out for assistance, but my body stumbled to my control and easily pushed her aside.

My room opened on to a corridor, a line of identical doors with numbers on little white plaques. There was a bathroom a few doors down, but I hadn’t wanted to go any further than that before. Now I wanted out. I wanted to be with my father.

Not lost. I couldn’t get lost, or I wouldn’t find him. I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply, reminding myself with each one that they air smelt clean and fine and not at all of salt. When the nurse’s hand brushed against my arm again I stepped away, but put my hands up quickly.

“Please,” I said. I had used that word so many times that it had almost lost meaning, but I found some for it again now. “Please, take me to meet him.”

  
  
  
  


Running would not have worked, but asking did. The nurse – Anita, she said – found me a coat and some slippers, took me to the elevators, and remained quiet for most of the time. I could not have handled more words.

“They’re using one of the emergency exits,” she said as we reached the bottom floor. I just nodded.

The fear was creeping back by then. I knew what they had done to me, knew too well. I knew what they had done to my mother. If they had done anything to my father, if he knew what it was to feel the fists in his belly or the needles in his hands or-

Jittering pain ran up my arms, and I stumbled against the wall of the elevator. Metal on my shoulder and cheek; I jerked away as light flashed across my eyes and pain lanced across the side of my face, pulling me down into the dark, the fire on my bones.

“Mulan.” A cool hand rested against my forehead. My eyes were open, but all that I could see was blackness. “Mulan, come back to me. You’re safe. Come on.”

Gradually my vision wheeled out again, and I realised that Anita was still beside me, looking at me with concerned eyes. My cheek still burned; no, that was not the shocks, that had been the rain, that terrible rain, and it took every scrap of me to remember that both of those things had passed. I concentrated instead on the hand on my forehead, until I could slowly nod without it just looking like a shudder, and allowed myself to be led out of the elevator and into the corridor.

The air was clearer here, easier to breathe. Anita coaxed me along one corridor, then another, through to a quieter part of the hospital where the sounds of footsteps and voices faded away. “It’s busy here,” I said.

“Yes, with everything that’s been happening. Some of the fighting in District Two has been pretty bad... there’s talk of another offer of surrender in the next day or two. Hopefully that will bring an end to it all, and we can work on the peace.”

There was something wistful in her words. “Did you know about the rebellion?” My voice cracked as we turned one last corner and came to what looked like a loading bay, with a pair of wide-open doors and a handful of people in hospital scrubs standing waiting. There were no other people who looked like patients.

It took a while for Anita to reply. “My husband was involved. He used to... drop hints. But I never really knew all that much. Just that there was a strong feeling against the Capitol. When it started, I was surprised... but not shocked.”

I had distant memories of screaming at Captain Chernabog that the Capitol should not have been surprised that there was a rebellion at all. Perhaps I had even been right.

  
  
  
  


One of the Capitol cars had been requisitioned to bring the people back. When it arrived, I immediately stood up straighter, heart pounding in my chest, and had to clasp my hands together to stop them from shaking. The other hospital workers stepped forwards to help out the people inside, one at a time: an old woman with mottled bruises on her face and her hair shorn; a young woman, little more than a girl, with her arm strapped to her chest; a man who looked unharmed, but with a vacant look in his eyes; and my father.

He looked the same. At least, I knew him at a glance, did not even have to pause. I tried to walk quickly towards him, but my legs struggled beneath me and I might have staggered once or twice.

“Baba.” My voice was quiet; he didn’t look up. “Baba!”

My father’s head jerked up, looking around in that wary way that he usually did after a nightmare. The cane in his hand was some white plastic thing, not his wooden one. Then I was right in front of him, reaching out my arms, but he looked at me blankly, no recognition in his eyes.

No. Please, no, let him not have been taken by the Capitol, let him not...

“Ping?”

I stepped in and threw my arms around him, a sob pulsing through me. One of his arms wrapped around me in return, and for a long moment it didn’t even matter that he had called me by my brother’s name. We had answered to each for years, after all. Then the guilt, and the pain, stabbed into me, because whatever happened I would only be one of his children, and could not bring the other back.

“It’s me, Baba,” I replied. My voice was still trembling, all over the place, but I swallowed and held on to him more tightly. “It’s just _me_.”

“ _Mulan_.”

His cane clattered to the ground as his other arm wrapped tightly around me, and I felt more of his weight. It didn’t matter, though. For the first time since the end of the Hunger Games, I felt tears running down my face as I cried, and held my father close, and finally dared to hope that the world might be right again.

  
  
  
  


Kida found me sitting outside the hospital room, to give my parents some privacy for their reunion. I would not have looked up from the feet in front of me were it not for the deep brown of the skin that showed between the shoes and the too-short pants, reminding me of her. She said my name just as I realised, and I straightened up in my chair and found my frown fading. Though her arm was in a sling and she seemed to have traded a fuller shirt for the blue tube top that she had been wearing in training, she was smiling, her eyes bright.

“What happened?” I said.

“District Two is ours,” she replied. There was a flush in her cheeks. “The last stronghold is gone; we feared it would be a siege, but some of the residents remembered tunnels that had been collapsed, and used them to reach the water supply and shut it down. When they realised what had happened, most of them surrendered, and handed over their weapons to us when they came out.”

Before I could say anything, she continued, slightly breathlessly.

“Yensid is dead. Perhaps it is better this way; he would have wanted a very public execution, and now he will not have one. The former head of his military, General Michael Mausel, agreed to make the announcement to any other groups of resistance, because they will believe him but not us. It is finally _over_.”

“I meant...” I waved at her arm, her missing shirt. Looking with fresher eyes, I could see now that there were faint, slightly pinkish scars all over her right shoulder as well.

Kida actually looked at her arm before giving a one-shouldered shrug. “A stray bullet glanced me. Most of them surrendered, but not all. It is not serious, it just needs to be properly cleaned. Some of those who surrendered were hit worse; there was fighting inside, it seems.”

“Congratulations.” I meant the word, but it was difficult to find enough emotion to put into it to feel right for all that I knew it meant. Yensid was dead, Panem was free from him for the first time in over seventy-four years, and all that I wanted to do was curl up in my bed and wait for Ping to come back and make my family complete again.

She extended out her hand to me, and at first I just stared at it dumbly before realising that she meant for me to take it. Rather than pull me up, Kida just squeezed. “We’re free, Mulan,” she said. I hadn’t noticed before how her accent changed the shape of my name, but it didn’t stop it from being _mine_. “Now we can start fixing things.”

  
  
  
  


District One was relatively intact. The rebellion here had taken the form of officials taking over and directing things back into the hands of the people, rather than riots and bombing. I was relieved. One or two of the victors, who had supported the Capitol, were gone, but there were fewer casualties than I had heard of from elsewhere. I supposed that we were lucky.

Victor’s Village was full of ghosts, but there was nowhere else for us to go. I gave my house to the family of someone who had died during the rebellion, moved back into my father’s instead, and wondered where things were supposed to go.

Some of the other Districts needed rebuilding work, but I was too weak to volunteer for that. Experts from various fields were moving around, and there was talk of arranging it so that normal citizens could as well. My father was a part of that. There was talk, as well, of starting up the farms again, and my grandmother and Master He and all of the older generation whose parents and grandparents had farmed were being asked what they remembered about that. I was just a victor, a child who had killed other children to survive, and there was nothing for me to do.

I stayed in my room for a while, trying to persuade myself that the flickering pains in my arms were not really there, before the confinement of one room became too much all over again. The garden was better, and I looked at the flowers that had been dying leaves when I had last seen them. Pink-white peach flowers were opening above me.

“Mulan.” My father’s voice made me startle, reaching for a knife that wasn’t there, before I caught myself. He joined me in the shrine, and gestured for us to sit down. “I’m sorry that this didn’t start earlier. We had to wait for the right time.”

I had suspected that he had known, but it had never been made clear. For some reason, that thought shook me, but I shifted closer to him on the bench. “Well, it’s happened now. That’s the important thing.”

His hand came to rest on my shoulder, and it felt like I was young again, with a touch of the hand giving more praise than words ever could. I held on to the words, turning them over in my mind. It had happened. We were free. I had lived long enough to see the rebellion – well, I supposed that it should be called a revolution now.

“They’re looking for Ping,” he added, and my brother’s name made a lump rise in my throat. “There are still Capitol facilities to be checked. But if he is there, they will find him.”

There was hope in his voice, but I did not know exactly how these places worked, or how many of them there were. I didn’t know whether Ping had been sent to the sort of place that I had been, or where my parents had been held, or where the girl who had been given my name had come from. I hoped that they had been able to send her back to her family, if she had one left, and give her back her _self_. That, at least, the Capitol had not ripped from me.

“There is a saying that my mother taught me, and that her father taught her.” I hoped that it was not one of my grandmother’s more colourful sayings. “Even the ordinary people can raise or fell a country. No matter how hard things seem, we will make things right.”

I leant my head into his shoulder and allowed myself to cry again, the tears soothing in eyes that had felt too dry for too long. For a while we sat there, but this time it did not matter how long it was; now we were free, and we had as long as was needed to make things right again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter will be an afterword, with a bit of extra worldbuilding and background information. A sort of extended author's note, if you will, to go with the length of the story.


	31. Afterword

The amount that I wanted to say to go with this story meant that this wasn't going to work as just a series of notes to go with the chapters, not to mention that many would be spoilery in the extreme. **POSTED: Dec 2012. Redraft is planned.**

 

This fic came about at something of an angle to itself. I wanted to tell two stories - Mulan's and Kida's - and what developed was the a fic which followed the times during which their stories overlapped. Ab Extra Salus therefore tracks from the first day that their paths cross, the day of the Reaping, through to when Mulan goes back home.

These two stories actually play out on really different scales. Mulan's is a very personal story, a sort of tragedy that would, in any other year, have come to a different end than it did. Either there would have been an 'accident' or - and this is probably more likely, considering the leverage that the Capitol has over her - she would have been forced into 'becoming' Ping and living out a life pretending to be him. Kida, on the other hand, is part of the far larger story of the rebellion (which, by the end, should more rightly be called a revolution) that has been developing for at least two decades and probably more, involving thousands of people.

In terms of worldbuilding, this was a bit of a shortcut for me. The rebellion is outside Mulan's world - or at least, she doesn't realise that it is already affecting her, that the undercurrent of rebellion throughout Panem is in her as well. Once she hears about it, it makes sense, but she doesn't know the full of why she is captured and tortured by the government. At any other time, Mulan would have been a scandal to be quickly buried when the government discovered her - threatened, sent home, her brother bought to the Capitol in her place and made up or given surgery to look like her. Because of the timing, however, the rebellion meant that Mulan could not be dealt with immediately without the risk of something being spotted - and what she intended to be a personal act looked to the powers that be like a direct defiance.

 

**Districts**

In an ideal world, each District would have corresponded to one Disney movie, but sadly there weren't enough characters in all of the movies for that. Most of them, however, are, and follow the [same delineations](http://thehungergames.wikia.com/wiki/Panem#Districts) as in the Hunger Games books.

Kida gives a general explanation for why the districts are so specialised - it was designed to ensure that no district could really survive without input from the Capitol (which, of course, controlled movement between them). If any district had a more rounded economy, it would be considered too independent and too much of a risk of rebellion. Kida describes this as both unnatural and unsustainable, and it's certainly far more extreme than the Roman Empire by which Panem is originally inspired. (Though the Roman Empire did involve huge amounts of trade, facilitated by control of the seas, it was still mostly in surpluses and luxury items rather than in the raw staples which seem to come from very few Districts in Panem.)

District Four deserves a particular mention here. My first instinct was to put it just in the Pacific North West (see [this official map](http://www.hungergamestrilogy.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/official-map-of-panem.jpg) for an idea of the layout of Panem), because of the rich fish resources that sustained peoples like the Haida and Tlingit. However, I eventually went with the most southerly district because it has access to both the eastern and western coasts and the different currents make different sea resources available on each side, and because it made more plausible the 'Atlantis' island to which Kida refers.

 

**Atlantis**

In this book, Kida's being 'from' Atlantis is more in the symbolic sense that she shares the ideals of the rebellion. Furthermore, Atlantis is not a literal lost island - it's just a part of the world that Panem had mostly forgotten about, given a name which people had mostly forgotten about. Roughly speaking, it is one of the northern mountains of the Andes range, with most of South America having been flooded by whatever happened to form Panem and cut it off from the rest of the world. The flooding of central America will have meant that there will now be flow between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, but through a narrower area and with areas of shallows formed by former islands. This, and unpredictable weather, cause even District Four to be unaware of the existence of 'Atlantis' for some time.

Whether or not there is a native population of Atlantis whom the District Four residents met when they landed there did not end up getting mentioned in the books. For the record: there is. And having been abandoned by Panem (and possibly, in the early days, attacked), they are more than happy to assist the rebels in exchange for communication, trade and assistance once Panem is free.

 

**The Rulers and The Rebellion**

Considering everything that is happening to her, I did not think it too likely that Mulan would be particularly interested in the ins-and-outs of the rebellion, but she heard the outline. Panem has been a one-party state from well before the Dark Days, with a small group of leaders vying for power. The President would change from time to time, but as they had to come from a select class in the Capitol, and only the Capitol could vote, it did not make much real difference. District Thirteen in particular became angry about this, and as they had the best links with all of the other Districts - the highest level of trade - they spearheaded the rebellion that became the Dark Days.

Thirteen was destroyed, and Panem's ability to produce power was badly depleted, which is part of what causes the real deprivation in the Districts as the years go on. Yensid had been made President before the Dark Days, but during them - they must have lasted at least months, if not years - he stopped the elections to focus on the 'war effort'. Even after Thirteen was gone, and the Districts restored as they are known at the time of the story, the elections were suppressed as various 'issues' or 'crises' were found that had to be addressed. Eventually, Yensid managed to persuade people that changing leader was bad for the stability of the country, and his place was secured.

The Hunger Games are essentially to remind the other Districts that they survive only because the Capitol _allows_ them to. After all, why not just kill twenty-four children a year? The message is that they can earn survival through doing what the Capitol wants, and for the most part it has kept the Districts in line.

What it has not done, however, is stopped the Districts from _hating_ the Capitol, and this is essentially the mistake that underpins the Capitol. Taking away opportunities and power from the Districts has only been putting off the inevitable, because although Yensid is still respected and loved in the Capitol, he and his power are hated in Panem as a whole.

The rebellion might have been put off for even longer if there had not been the Hunger Games and Victory Tours. The Victors, of all people, have reason to hate the Capitol - especially if they were genuinely Reaped, and not Careers who actually wanted to take part. Victors are also able to communicate with each other, enter the Capitol, and enter other Districts during the Victory tours. They are not the only ones who have this sort of power - mayors, Peacekeepers, and other authority figures also do - but they often would not have desired their position in the first place.

The Rebellion started as a handful of ideas, but soon those ideas spread, and ever more people began to realise that there were other people who _also_ hated the Capitol. Eventually, this reached a tipping point, and what would have started as an undercurrent of anger would have become a full-blown rebellion. The existence of Atlantis, outside Panem's reach, would have helped to spur this along by having somewhere that refugees from various Districts could communicate, before sending messages back to District Four by sea. Communication would have been slow, but it would have existed nonetheless.

It is clear that the Capitol is not large. In area, it is much the same as any other District, although it could probably hold a higher population density. It is also very heavily implied that few to no Capitol residents would be able to fight. Therefore the Capitol's entire hold on Panem based on economy and propoganda. Knowledge of the rebellion would have undermined the propoganda, and breaking economic control will only affect the Districts in the short run, before trade can be reestablished and then the Districts can start to become more self-sufficient again. Once people realise this, it is essentially a cause of overcoming the fear and prompting people to start fighting - once one domino goes, all of the rest will follow.

I can't lie, I used Kida for this partially because I am in love with Atlantis: The Lost Empire right now. But I also find her very interesting as a character, with the various facets of her personality, and her ties with a dying culture which she wants to do something to save. I felt this shifted well to being the trigger for the rebellion.

Or, perhaps, not so much the trigger as the symbol. People already want to rebel, but they need a sign to make sure that they all rebel at once and basically overwhelm the Capitol's rather scanty forces. As Kida points out, the mandatory-watching Hunger Games is the perfect chance for this. Whispers go through the grapevine that the appearance of Kida and certain key words which she dropped into the interview (sadly unseen, as Mulan walked away; this may change in my redraft) will be the cue for rebellion.

The government suspects that this is coming, but since Kida made herself so visible at fourteen, it has been difficult to arrange an 'accident' for her without triggering the rebellion instead. That is why the Arena was so harsh this year, in an attempt to kill her off and hope that at least some of the Districts would not rebel, letting the Capitol put them down one by one instead. Nothing like killing people off more quickly than usual to stomp on the embers of hope, I would imagine.

 

**The Politics**

Considering the tone of the fic, I suppose that I can't really go without addressing the political issues that underpin it. It is nothing new in literature to have evil one-party states, or evil heads of one-party states; these are almost givens by now. A lot of classic dystopian novels are also written more as warnings, so they don't tend to address too much of what comes after. The Hunger Games world is an exception.

I decided not to directly address the political situation that comes after, partially because there are not the words in-universe to deeply discuss things, partially because Mulan does not really care right now. Yensid's government is a fascist one modelled (at least in this fic) after those of the inter-war era in Europe, but the one that replaces it will not be. Indeed, the political situation in Panem is such that it may become a new type of political ideology altogether. What Kida describes is probably closest to direct democracy, but in a country as large as Panem this will obviously not be the eventual form of government. While Kida may one day wish to be part of running Panem, she is still young, and her role lies elsewhere for now; she, like much of Panem, is very politically naive in some ways.


End file.
